Dowsing

Plague Poems #4

Day 56

No one is chasing us
through bombed streets
or trying to systematically
hunt us down and murder us

except for this virus
like a mine bobbing in the droplets
of our own spit, or a mace that
cudgels the careless and arrogant,
which we can outwit
by holing up like
the Frank family
sans Nazis and
plus grocery and liquor delivery
and Internet.

Don’t say you can’t take this anymore.

Six weeks is nothing
in wartime.
Ask the Afghanis
and Syrians, the Somalis
and Congolese,
the grandparents and great grandparents
who fled Europe
with only what they wore,
or who lived nightly
in terror of bombs
dropping on their houses
and beloved cities.
Think of their years of uncertainty,
how much sweeter
stability and peace were
when they found them again.

Think of yourself as called
to this moment in history
as to a vocation.
It is our turn to
practice lovingkindness.
It takes so little
to save someone else
in this invisible conflagration,
this firestorm of infection,
this slow-motion earthquake
of the Old Ways:
soap, twenty seconds of diligence,
a mask, a temporary resistance
to the human need for
proximity and touch.

Our calling now is not to fight
except with words
against the ignorance
that could destroy us,
and to resist
returning to the world
that spawned that ignorance
and the poverty of thought and time
and compassion
that led us here.
Our calling is
to learn patience with
ourselves and others, learn
compassion for their fears
and our own, learn
to be with ourselves
and ones we love
and don’t yet love
in a new way
for an unknown time
that—if we allow it—
can reshape not only us
but the world
for the better.

‒April 25, 2020, Brooklyn
©Lee Kottner 2020

Plague Poems #3

Black Horses

I hear them in the night
when the flesh is weakest,
somewhere at a distance,
our little crossroads
of small houses and
apartments hardly taller
mostly spared
until today.

This one, brazen,
stopped right outside, silently
painting my walls red/white/red/white
under the storm-grey skies,
the driver and partner
masking and gloving up
like highwaymen
but carrying two tackleboxes
like fishers of souls.

It used to feel like help was coming
to see the strobes of light
come up the street and park.
Now it’s like seeing
the black coach-and-four of the Cóiste Bodhar and
the hearing the siren wail of the Bean-Sidhe.

And yet I called out the window
to thank them
for wading into a building
like a leper colony,
afire with infection,
only to be relieved, later,
to watch them leave again
without a passenger
and no hearse behind them—
no one overrun
by nightmares
this time.

‒April 23, 2020, Brooklyn
©Lee Kottner, 2020

Quarantine Thoughts, Part 2: Science Will Save Our Asses

I got a private message from a FB friend recently that basically said she felt insulted because I argued with her about the folk "cures" and preventions that are going around the Interwebs (esp. Facebook) for COVID 19. She's learning to be an Ayurvedic therapist and feels, somehow, that this is on par with the level of knowledge that microbiologists, immunologists, epidemiologists, geneticists, pharmaceutical and organic chemists, and MDs on the front lines of treatment are bringing to the COVID 19 table right now. Imma just say it: older is not necessarily wiser. 

The argument was over this piece of disinformaton (with my comments in brackets), which Snopes has debunked piece by piece:

Doctors are reporting they now understand the behavior of the COVID 19 virus due to autopsies that they have carried out. This virus is characterized by obstructing respiratory pathways with thick mucus that solidifies and blocks the airways and lungs. So they have discovered that in order to apply a medicine you have to open and unblock these airways so that the treatment can be used to take effect however all of this takes a number of days. Their recommendations for what you can do to safeguard yourself are ...

1) Drink lots of hot liquids - coffees, soups, teas, warm water. In addition take a sip of warm water every 20 minutes bc this keeps your mouth moist and washes any of the virus that’s entered your mouth into your stomach where your gastric juices will neutralize it before it can get to the lungs. [gastric acids do not kill it; it's been found in feces. Liquids must be 133° F—hot enough to scald you—to "kill" it.]

2) Gargle with an antiseptic and warm water like vinegar or salt or lemon every day if possible [only bleach, alcohol, and soap "kill" it. These gargles do nothing.]

3) The virus attaches itself to hair and clothes. And detergent or soap kills it but you must take bath or shower when you get in from the street. Avoid sitting down in your home and go straight to the shower. If you cannot wash your clothes daily, hang them in sunlight which also helps to neutralize the virus. [You do not need to wash your clothes every day or shower every time you go out. Nobody is doing this. Just don't shake what you've worn outside as it releases the virus into the air.]

4) Wash metallic surfaces very carefully bc the virus can stay viable on these for up to 9 days. Take note and be vigilant about touching hand rails, door knobs, etc. and keep these clean in home home [This is true.]

5) Don’t smoke [this is true in general.]

6) Wash your hands every 20 minutes with any soap that foams and do this for 20 seconds [You don't need to wash your hands every 20 minutes. Only if you've been outside or touched things that have come in from outside.]

7) Eat fruits and vegetables. Try to elevate your zinc levels [Maybe this helps, maybe it doesn't]

8)Animals do not spread the virus to people. Its a person to person transmission. [This is true.]

9) Try to avoid getting the common flu as this already weakens your system and try to avoid eating and drinking any cold things. [Getting the flu or anything else doesn't weaken your immune system. If you get too many things at once it might stress it though. Eating and drinking cold things don't affect you one way or the other; that's a holdover from Chinese folk medicine and they have a different definition of hot and cold foods that has nothing to do with temperature.]

10) If you feel any discomfort in your throat or a sore throat coming on, attack it immediately using the above methods. The virus enters the system through the throat but will sit in the throat for 3-4 days before it passes into your lungs. [The virus does not sit in the throat for 3-4 days. It immediately enters the mucosal tissue in the mouth and nose and starts replicating itself.]

In addition ...

Experts suggest doing this simple verification every morning: Breathe in deeply and hold your breath for 10 seconds. If this can be done without coughing, without difficulty, this shows that there is no fibrosis in the lungs, indicating the absence of infection. It is recommended to do this control every morning to help detect infection. [Fine. whatever]

The problem here is that the pathogenesis (how the virus infects and proceeds to make you sick) is not just factually false for this virus, but the recommendations are starting from a baseline assumption of some immunity. We've been exposed to cold and flu viruses for years and have some immunity even if those viruses mutate a bit. They are still cold and flu viruses, and we already have some antibodies to them floating around in our bloodstreams from exposure and vaccines. The blueprint for more antibodies is already programmed into us.

For this virus there is nada. Nunca. Nothing. Squat. Fuck all.

Those pre-existing antibodies from other corona viruses don't help. Our baseline means nothing right now. This is an entirely new species. It doesn't matter how healthy our immune system is because it has nothing to work with. We are starting from zero. None of these things mentioned above will help us produce antibodies to a brand new pathogen any quicker. Perfectly healthy people with well-functioning immune systems are getting this and are totally overwhelmed by it. Something similar happened with the 1918-1919 Spanish flu. It was the healthy people it really pummeled, overactivating their immune systems. We were terrorized by that virus for much the same reason that we are being terrorized by COVID 19: there were no vaccines to jumpstart our antibody production. We're at the mercy of this corona virus as we were at the mercy of Yersina pestis, the cause of the Black Plague—except that we now have Science on our side. 

When we talk about a "healthy" immune system, we're talking about one in which all the component parts function as they should. That's a lot of different kinds of cells, and a lot of complex processes. While it's true that being healthy in general, and eating real food that's good for you probably means your natural processes are getting the fuel they need to work as they should, that's no guarantee you won't get sick, because you can't guarantee you won't get infected with something. Some vitamins and minerals, which are best gotten through diet and not supplements, directly contribute to the healthy functioning of your immune system, but the way you boost it is to get vaccinated.

Vaccines provide the blueprint for possible future infections and prime the body to start producing the specific antibodies in large enough quantity to overwhelm and shut down the invader when it starts showing up in large quantities in your body, whether it's bacterial or viral. Without a vaccine for a pathogen, you have to fall back on treatment and support. For a totally new pathogen, finding a treatment is a bit hit or miss. You have to look at the symptoms and decide what's causing them, then match that up with an existing pharmaceutical that treats a similar problem. That may or may not work because you might have the wrong cause, or there's a different mechanism causing that symptom. Failing successful treatments, you can only support the body physically while it fights like hell to produce enough antibodies on its own to kill or deactivate the invader. In the worst cases of COVID-19, that can mean ventilators, because the most horrifying and critical symptom is the production of bloody mucous that floods the lungs. Sometimes the support is enough. Sometimes it's not.

Common sense should tell you that if gargling and good food and not smoking and avoiding the flu were enough to prevent getting this, we wouldn't have an out-of-control pandemic. People like to think they can do easy things to avoid terrible consequences because we're all basically lazy and it gives us a sense of control. Good news! In this case, you can do some easy things to avoid getting sick:

1. Stay the fuck home. If at all possible, don't go out for groceries or anything else for the next three weeks, especially if you live in New York (we're kinda fucked right now). Isolation will stop this virus dead in its tracks. That's the best case scenario and it's not going to happen. The best we can hope fore is keep it from overwhelming our medical facilities. Staying home is literally the best thing you can do. 
2. If you do have to go out, wear gloves and a mask, don't touch your face, and stay at least 6 feet away from other people. I know the evidence for cloth masks is uncertain right now but here's something else to think about: a mask reminds you to not touch your face, and it keeps other people safe from you by catching the moisture from your breath. It's also a reminder that this is serious business.
3. When you get home, or when you touch anything you or other people have brought in from outside, wash your hands with soap for at least 20 seconds after you've disinfected what's been brought in with a bleach solution or wipes (or Lysol), or use hand sanitizer with at least 60% alcohol in it. If you're wearing gloves, peel them off so they turn inside out, and for God's sake, don't throw them away in the parking lot of the grocery store. Who do you think is going to have to pick them up, and why are you spreading your germs around more?

You won't kill the virus doing any of these things, but you will thwart its spread or deactivate it. I use the word deactivate because viruses, bless their freaky little selves, are not living things. They are molecular constructs built to deliver RNA or sometimes DNA to the interior of a host cell to hijack the host's replication machinery and insert its own genes to make more of itself rather than the host cell. In the case of the corona virus, there's a lipid (fat) shell, holding together little protein molecules that bind with the surface of the host cell and let it penetrate the host. When you wash a greasy pot with soapy water, the grease breaks down and washes away. Same thing with the virus. When the soap breaks the lipids down, the virus falls apart and the mechanism by which it enters a cell becomes inert. Deprived of moisture, it dries out and falls apart, also becoming inert. So you want to either break down the lipid shell or dehydrate it. Soap, bleach or alcohol are the only things that do this.

So if somebody is telling you to use vinegar or peroxide or some other non-toxic "natural" cleaner, wake them up. I've been moving from some of the more egregious chemical cleaners to less toxic ones; I clean my windows with vinegar instead of Windex, for instance. But I keep bleach and alcohol in the house to disinfect surfaces and really ugly wounds (like cat punctures), respectively. This is a mean virus and it needs to be dealt with harshly. Bleach, soap, alcohol. This is what the scientists tell us, and they've been doing their damnedest to keep us all safe. The other people telling you other stuff? At least some of them are out to make a buck. Some of them mean well but don't have any scientific basis for what they're saying. Some of them don't believe in science, and those are the most dangerous.

Rigorous, science-based medicine and hygiene based in germ theory are the new kids on the block, relatively, but the track record for them is a hell of a lot better than anything else we've come up with in the last 6,000 years for just about any acute and infectious disease and condition that you can name: typhoid, yellow fever, polio, measles, mumps, scarlet fever, rubella, chicken pox, small pox, intestinal ulcers, cancer—you name it. Anything that was a scourge to humans before germ theory and antibacterials and antivirals, western medicine has done a great job of getting a handle on it. So great that people have forgotten what it's like to live just like we're living now: in terror of something that we can't see without a microscope. People who got AIDS or were at risk for it remember, but the treatment and prevention of it have been so successful in my lifetime that the younger generation has never experienced that terror, either, and has too often thrown caution to the wind. That's the beauty of science based medicine: it's its own worst PR. But no other theory of health successfully found the cause, explained the mechanism, and developed those treatments and preventions. No other system is going to do it now. Peer reviewed, systematic, replicable science is going to save our asses.

Unless you can explain the actual mechanism of how what you're touting works on this virus and its symptoms in the body, just sit down and let the experts save lives. Stay at home, sanitize with bleach or alcohol or soap, wear a mask if you go out, and wash your damn hands in the meanwhile.

Plague Poems #1

Crown

of protein diadems
on a lipid shell

of infection numbers
topping even its point of origin

of sirens on the streets
overlaying the barren silence

of flashing red and white alarm
on the Empire State building: MaydayMaydayMayday

of blossoms on the cherry tree
outside my window

as Nature goes on
without
us.

–31 March 2020, Brooklyn
© Lee Kottner, 2020

Quarantine Thoughts, Part 1: Reshaping the World

"Everything we do before a pandemic will seem alarmist. Everything we do after a pandemic will seem inadequate."

–Michael O. Leavitt, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, 2007

 

Soooooo many thoughts. So many.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about the Big Picture lately, and that's where I want to go right now. I'm not all that detail-oriented as a person but I'm good at pulling back and seeing patterns in events. If I could parlay that into working the stock market, or cared enough to, I'd be rich. But I'm more interested in the ebb and flow of history and social trends. Fascinated by it, really. William Gibson's book Pattern Recognition really spoke to me. I think I may have to re-read it. Anyway, I fear this will be one of a multi-part series. If the pandemic goes on long enough, I'll have my own collection of plague letters.

Because you realize that's what this is right? It's a plague, like the Black Death. A plague, but not The Plague. Not as virulent, thank goodness, but potentially able to wipe out a significant percent of the total population. And the Black Death, when it swept through the world in the Middle Ages, changed everything, in a way the last great pandemic, the Spanish Flu, did not. I'll append some links to useful information and science-geek sources on Covid-19 (the disease vs. the virus) at the end, but I've been doing a lot of that at my Facebook page (yes, I caved and went back; more on that in another post), where you can search the #covid19 hashtag, but that's not where I'm heading right now.

Right now, I'm seeing this as a watershed moment not just in the US, but the world. We are at a tipping point of many consequences, one that has the possibility to change the way we work, the way we interact socially, our political systems, our economics. Even how we arrange our lives. I don't think it will be long before most of the U.S. is forced into quarantine like China, because our response has been so woefully inadequate from the git-go. Americans don't obey orders well, and the last several years have seen us inundated with scientifically illiterate talking heads, poor scientific education for the masses, and most recently, a demagogue who is a moron and a fool who believes only in what he knows, which ain't much. So this is unlikely to be the orderly quarantine of China or Europe.

As an example, there's "Katie Williams, a former Ms. Nevada who was stripped of her title for putting pro-Trump postings on the non-political Ms. America social media accounts [responding to AOC's call for people under 40 to stay the hell home:] 'I just went to a crowded Red Robin and I’m 30. It was delicious, and I took my sweet time eating my meal. Because this is America. And I’ll do what I want,'” cited by the indispensable Heather Cox Richardson. I had an argument just last night with a young college-age idiot who repeated the "this is just a media hoax to weaken the president" party line from Fox (the perpetrator of which has since been put on leave, to Fox's credit). Assholes like that, and like a well-educated Facebook acquaintance—who insists on traveling because he's old, and he's got a zillion frequent-flyer miles to use up, and doesn't care what happens to him—are what make pandemics what they are. Quarantines only work if people have no physical contact with infected people or surfaces. It's not about you getting it, dumbasses, it's about you spreading it. This is why I'm at home right now.

I've been a little under the weather since about last Thursday (March 4th). The symptoms have been so mild that I didn't think much of it: a teeny fever I didn't know I had until I bothered to take my temperature; an almost-sore throat; a cough I attributed to seasonal allergies, though my nose isn't running much. By the time I had the information and presence of mind to think I might have been infected, it's possible that I'd been spreading it for at least a week, if I've got it. I'm not happy about that. I'm not sick enough to warrant going anywhere for treatment, and I couldn't get tested if I did, because our government has fucked this up so royally that we may never get a good count of how many people this virus infected, unlike China or Korea, who will have tested hundreds of thousands if not millions of people to get accurate data. But the idea that I've possibly been infecting other people really bothers me.

But this post is not about me. This is not me virtue-signaling either. This is me trying to model what the right thing to do is because so many people don't understand how serious this is. Stay home if you can. If you must go out, keep your distance, wash your hands, cover your mouth with a tissue when you sneeze or cough and throw the tissue away, wear gloves you can either throw out or wash. Stay. Home. I've been self-quarantining now for a week, and will continue to do so. My office asked us all to work at home if we could on March 5th, the day after I decided to stay home and take a sick day. Yesterday, our CEO announced that it seemed likely we would be working at home beyond the initial projection of March 23rd. I think we're likely to be doing it for a long time.

A looooooong time. Like, months. (A friend who was on a CDC conference call today said they are predicting ongoing infections into next year.)

And the longer that time is, the more businesses shut down or shift the way they do business—from us going to them to them coming to us—the more changes happen in our economy. The more changes in our economy—lost jobs, mandatory paid sick leaves, quarantining of all non-essential workers (medical personnel, people in infrastructure jobs, repair people, banks, pharmacies, grocery stories, delivery people) the more our way of life changes. The longer that goes on, the more normal it becomes. The more normal it becomes, the less we want to go back to the old ways when this is over. The end result is massive social change.

There is a tsunami of things that need to happen to support ordinary people in the midst of a pandemic, especially in a country like ours where there is very little in the way of social safety net. When people get sick or infected, we don't want them working in public or with pubic goods. That means mandatory sick days or loss of jobs for people who are running public transportation, delivering your mail and goods, manning the gas pumps. When people lose their jobs, they can't pay bills or rent. Landlords and banks lose mortgage and rent payments. They can't pay their bills. Wealth doesn't trickle down, but poverty sure does in this instance. Our lack of mandatory paid sick days is a major failing. My vote for Most Despised Motherfucker in the World, Jeff Bezos, owner of Whole Foods, has offered his serfs two weeks of paid sick leave and unlimited unpaid sick leave, and urged his workers to donate their vacation time to their colleagues. Like he couldn't afford to absorb a month or more of paid sick leave for all his Amazon and subsidiary employees without missing anything in his grotesque pile of cash.

I can rant about Bezos's lack of humanitarian values all day, but Amazon, especially, is illustrative of the underlying problem. If you cannot afford to not work, you are a source of contagion. If you are too sick to work, your fiscal house of cards falls over in the winds of a system that demands money for everything. When enough houses fall over, when enough people are evicted, have their utilities cut off, their internet turned off, their houses repossessed, their cars—that plunges more and more people into the kind of poverty it's almost impossible to get out of later. Capitalism has no mercy. And with the majority of wealth concentrated in the hands of a few people, we are in no position to weather even a couple of months of non-payments. That will lead to economic collapse. And the dispossessed are an excellent pool of vectors, so the pandemic takes longer to burn itself out, and then they become endemic sources. Trade and tourism get shut off because we can't get our shit together. That tanks our economy further. The cause and effect here is really fucking brutal. 

Closing schools is another example of the unintended consequences problem. School is a source of contagion. Kids are germ factories and snot everywhere. We all know this. But if you close schools, who's going to watch the kids of people who can't afford childcare and must go to work to pay the rent, many of whom perform vital services for the rest of us? Where are the kids who depend on school lunches for their main meal of the day going to eat? What if we had a basic income? What if we had affordable childcare for all? What if we had a president who wasn't eviscerating the food stamp program? What if he hadn't bankrupted so many farms with his stupid manufactured trade war bullshit? 

And don't even start me on healthcare. I don't think I need to explain what a hot mess that is in the middle of a pandemic, with or without gutting the CDC and making us utterly unready to face this. Or the fact that so few of us have access to healthcare that won't bankrupt us. And when people start dying in large numbers of something their government should be helping to alleviate, it tends to make them a little testy. That can lead to all sorts of world-changing things. Or at least regime-changing.

So the system we have now, of unfettered capitalism and the sequestration of wealth among a few people, along with a group of leaders who think less government is more, is abysmally failing the test of the pandemic. Now what?

I can see this going a couple of ways, one good, one not so good.

After 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy, New Yorkers did an amazing job of helping each other out. People lined up to give blood, to volunteer, to search, to help rebuild, to feed, clothe and shelter each other. Sure there were some ugly incidents. There always are. But overall, we pulled together and helped each other. We became not just a city, but a community. Even when government failed, and it did in both instances in a big way for many people, the community didn't. 

Now, we've had too many years of meanness both on social media, via Faux News, and from our own elected officials. I don't think there's ever been an American administration as gratuitously, indifferently, indiscriminately cruel as this one is, even the ones that practiced genocide on Native Americans, supported slavery, and locked up Japanese Americans in concentration camps. This one fucks over everyone who is not a rich white male of a certain age. If you are not rich, fuck you.

One way this pandemic can go is that we can follow the lead of the administration and adopt an every man for himself attitude. Can't get healthcare? Too bad. Die, motherfucker, and your little dog too. Can't afford to not work or don't have any paid sick leave? Too bad. Work while you're sick, spreading the disease. We don't care. Quarantined and can't get out to get food? Too bad. Starve. Lost your job and can't pay your rent or mortgage? Too bad. Out the door. In this scenario, disaster capitalism rules and everything gets privatized or bought up that isn't already. The black market that is already getting started continues unchecked and encompasses more and more goods, including food and medicines that may or may not be efficacious. T-Rump uses this opportunity to impose martial law at the height of the quarantine and institute his favorite fascist policies. Your civil rights, always dicey during national emergencies, are "temporarily" suspended. Elections are "delayed." Schools and universities are permanently closed. Big business is bailed out but the common consumer is not. Eventually, the pandemic subsides, but we are left with a massive number of homeless people, and more dead than we should have had. The National Guard, or perhaps the army, deployed for the first time on American soil to enforce the quarantine, remains in place to suppress citizen unrest. The U.S. becomes a fascist state with Trump as president for life, our government pared down to nearly nothing, the rich getting rich and the poor—eh, let them eat cake.

Probably the sole check on the full horror of this scenario is that the pandemic is not Ebola or something more virulent and deadly. With that kind of a disease, even close neighbors can easily get panicked enough to weld you into your house and/or set it on fire with you inside, while handing over all their authority to whomever's in charge, hoping to save themselves.  Covid-19 is pretty mild by comparison. Being an old fart with at least two contraindications myself, I'm not going to say it doesn't matter that it mostly affects older people and the immuno-compromised. I have two friends with new kidneys I'm deeply worried about. But that it doesn't prey indiscriminately on everyone is far better than otherwise.

Now, here's what I'm hoping will happen: 

First, all those old, rich, white, male Republicans who pooh-poohed the severity of Covid-19 and went everywhere shaking hands and raising money for their re-election get sick as dogs and die. Kidding! (Maybe. Something has got to stop that sociopathic fuckhead Mitch McConnell from using his ideology to obstruct anything that might help people who aren't his donors and cronies.) Somehow, we hold T-Rump's feet to the fire and Congress manages to pass a massive aid bill (suck it out of the border wall funds and some of the military budget) that includes: mandatory paid sick leave; free covid-19 testing and treatment; a basic income to tide over people who have no other source of income and can't work during quarantine, have lost their jobs, or who are too sick to work; a moratorium on evictions and mortgage, rent, and utilities payments for the duration of your illness; strict enforcement of the ADA regulations forbidding people from being fired for this illness; suspension of student and other loan payments for the duration; investment in internet infrastructure to facilitate distance work and learning (let's just call it a public utility and be done; we all know we're paying too damn much for it now). Let me know if I forgot something.

None of this is impossible. Some of it is being instituted now in New York City and California, who I hope are leading the way to more community-minded action. AOC, Elizabeth Warren and Nancy Pelosi (and Bernie, I think; I haven't kept track) have all put forward plans to help ordinary people out, while T-Rump and his gang of robber barons are busy shoring up big business. But it's less the details of plans themselves that are important, though they are, than the message they send, which is, Take Care of Each Other. Help your neighbors. Don't pretend you can do this alone.  As my friend Sylvie Richards posted:

Do you know who the elderly people are in your building or neighborhood? In my building, the doormen have identified the elderly people who live alone. We are making sure that they have groceries, medicine, wipes, etc. and that they know that they are being cared for. Now is the time for us to take care of each other. Please -- identify and care for the elderly around you.

And of course, one of the reasons Mitch McSatan is fighting anything like this tooth and nail is that this legislation is a slippery slope to FDR-like programs: single-payer healthcare, free college, an infrastructure that serves the people not the corporations, loan forgiveness, job protections, maybe even—gasp!—higher wages. Not utopia, by any means, but a better way of life. Just as a sample of what this might lead to, the unintended consequences of supporting people: With better, cheaper internet service, maybe more of us will continue to telecommute, having broken the grasp of our micromanagers. Our cities would become less congested We'd need less office space and have more room for affordable housing. Imagine less commuting, less pollution from that commuting, less crowded public transportation. But again, the biggest change would be in us abandoning the bullshit myth of pulling ourselves up by our non-existent bootstraps, and bootstrapping each other instead. I'm not going to use the words kinder, gentler because they leave a bad taste in my mouth now, but there's so much room for us to become more humane. In becoming more humane, we become more human, less bigoted, more welcoming. 

My company had a massive Zoom meeting partially about our response to Covid-19 this Friday, followed by a note from our CEO. This is what she said, in part:

Please end the week by noticing what an incredible set of colleagues you have, and take time this weekend to rest and rejuvenate. I am so grateful to work with all of you, and proud of how everyone has engaged in problem-solving this week, across all levels of the organization and all our departments.  Take care of yourselves -- this is going to be either a half-marathon or a marathon, but certainly not a sprint.

Let's start work on Monday by finding ways to continue being kind to one another - for example, set up some cyber coffee breaks that help you connect with others at [work], relaxed time with either people you work with regularly or perhaps someone you've been meaning to get to know better. This is a weird circumstance in which our usual rituals of gathering with friends in our communities - whether at church or temple or at a restaurant - are being curtailed just when we need those comforting interactions.  So just as we have been creative at solving the challenges facing some of our projects, let's think outside the box about how to stay connected with one another and offer each other support. As one of many emerging examples, the intrepid group working on our Thursday 3/19 "critical conversations and celebrations" has been reworking it into a cyber-based community gathering. Something to look forward to toward week's end! 

In this spirit, I decided to organize a once-a-week or so Virtual Happy Hour in Zoom to keep track of my friends both online and the ones I usually see in meatspace. It's likely to be awhile before we can meet in person again, and seeing one another via videolink is far better than just interacting on social media. Let me know if you're interested, and I'll add you to the email group. Because our actions as a community and in-community might help tip this the right way for everyone and reshape the world in a good way.

---

As promised, some #covid19 resources:

Natalie Dorfeld's Colonel VonMittens (left) says it all.

Advice and explanations from science reporter Beth Mole at Ars Technica.

Very in-depth and multi-sourced information on Reddit.

Geeky: Covid-19 Surveillance Dashboard. And this one, made by a 17-year-old. Watch this motherfucker spread.

Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center

For the thick among you, a vivid illustration of how your heedlessness and selfishness makes other people sick. From WaPo.

A really great podcast.

Baby Steps

The solstice is a time of new beginnings. The light starts to come back, overpowering the dark, the seasons turn, and we hunker down for the winter, which is a time of introspection and creativity. So it seems, I hope, oracular that I had the day I did yesterday. I've started doing some electronic housecleaning, getting my bookmarks and passwords back in order for accounts I haven't touched in several years. These are mostly creative accounts connected to my website building, or bookmaking, or my now defunct teaching and freelance careers. Some of them are old enough that I've already been scrubbed from the sites themselves, which is fine. Most of those are obsolete or I don't use them anymore anyway. It's a little sobering that it's been that long though.

I'm also trying to change the way I work, so I set a repeating timer for 20 minutes and then got up out of my chair and did something else for varying amounts of time when it went off. Peed. Made the bed. Did the dishes. Looked over the mail. Had lunch. Made tea. (I just found a great Darjeeling from Arbor Teas in Ann Arbor. Fragrant and lush.) Planned dinner. Cooked. Stood up and sang a bit, which felt great! Ran out to do shopping. Swept the floor. Emptied the catbox. I thought it would be annoying, but it was actually good to get my ass out of the chair and not get sucked into the Intertubez so deeply, as deeply as I have been. I've also been weening myself off Facebook in preparation for my exodus in January (which won't be a total one, at east not yet; I'll be over at MeWe, too, for those who'd like to join me, just not as often, either).

credit: Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half

All of that electronic housecleaning and organizing seems a hopeful (and useful) step in my personal rehabilitation. That's what this feels like: rehab. I'm still feeling a little displaced, or maybe "unplaced" would be a better description, in an apartment that's not quite home but becoming it, in a life that's very different from one I knew for 25+ years. Yesterday was a bit like rediscovering that old self, or maybe unearthing her again (hopefully not like a zombie or vampire). I'm reminding myself of what I used to do when Facebook hadn't become an escape and a focus for my energy and rage. First thing in the morning, I used to read Arts & Letters Daily, which is a great aggregater for the kind of stuff writers and readers read. I used to read the comics every day, so I spent some time weeding my comics bookmarks, and adding some to Feedly. I reconnected with some old 2D friends, major portions of whose stories I've missed and may never catch up on, which makes me a bit sad. I may have to buy books to do that. (Oh no! Not that! Don't make me buy books!)

I also spent part of the day cleaning up my poetry market bookmarks and adding new ones. It's sad to see how many journals have folded in the time since I was regularly sending work out. But there are plenty more to take their places and lots of venerable ones hanging on. I won't start with how it pisses me off to have to pay to have my work read, which is one of my many soapboxes, this one about how our government doesn't support the arts in this country. Regardless, I'm at least thinking about submitting work again, which I haven't done much of, lately. And starting to act like a real writer again, whether I'm writing or not. It's a business if you're serious about it and some of your time has to be spent doing the business end. So while I'm waiting for my brain to clutter itself up again with voices, this seemed like a good way to spend my time.

And it led to a really wonderful and exciting day-making interchange with an editor who seems like she might be a new friend. 

I've been wondering what to do with all the poems I wrote about T-Rump in the first year of his reign, poems I wrote in a white-hot rage, one a day for a long time, until I was worn down and couldn't keep up with all the acts of cruelty and vileness. They were posted on Facebook and a resurrected blog I'd run during W's torture regime, The Perfidy Report. Fifty-four poems later, Days of Perfidy became a collection I despaired of ever finding a home for. Then, while trolling through the Poetry Submissions Portal on Facebook, I ran across a call from Headline Poetry & Press, which is all about political poetry. I looked over the submission guidelines, which included an email address to drop the editor a line if you had questions. I didn't just want to upload the whole manuscript so I shot her a note instead, explaining the manuscript's genesis and that the poems had been published on The Perfidy Report and giving her a link, thinking I'd hear back in January at the earliest. Much to my surprise, she responded only a half hour later with an enthusiastic interest. That started a really pleasant and fun back and forth email chain of the kind you have with new and interesting people, asking questions, answering them, sussing out what each of you like and are like.  

It's always gratifying when people like and are interested in publishing your work but it's even better when you make a personal connection with someone who likes your work. This was really great because I don't often email editors with personal requests like this. Like, never, in fact. Maybe I'm getting bolder in my old age. I'm not sure I can explain why this whole thing was so delightful. In part, it was the speed of the reply, the curiosity and openness and collaborative nature of the person on the other end and her sense of humor. I realized this morning that she reminds me, at least on paper, of my grad-school friend Gwen, another poet and generous soul that we lost to cancer a few years ago. Anyway, it was a really delightful experience back-and-forthing with her. Just what I needed to restore a little faith in myself.

 

 

Patriot or Not

I've been watching bits and pieces of the impeachment hearings (who hasn't?) this week, in between work tasks, and it's quite different from either the Nixon or the Clinton hearings. The latter was truly a farce over largely farcical and personal misconduct that should have just been handed to Hillary to deal with. (Yes, Clinton lied to Congress, but that's not what that was really about, was it? It was a foreshadowing of the mentality that's festered in the Republican Party to stay in power at all costs, even the loss of democracy.) Nixon's was far more shocking to a nation that still believed in itself, and it was clearly a criminal act, sprung from the paranoia of another Republican that mirrors the minority party's current paranoia.

T-Rump's hearing is different. The criminality is equally paranoid, and serves Republican paranoia about loss of power and a conspiracy of Others, but it's wrapped up in his own narcissism, attempts to be more subtle, and is more complex in nature than a break-in, as befits a second-rate, wannabe mob boss without a mob. Nice country you got here. Be a shame to lose it to the Russians. How about saying in public that you'll start an investigation of Joe Biden and his kid? We'll see what we can do for you. Jesus, the ineptitude. Of course, the denial of this kind of extortion only gets a pass when you propagate a distrust of the press and the career bureaucrats and diplomats who are the true professionals running the government. That distrust didn't exist during Clinton's or Nixon's hearings. 

Which brings me to Dr. Fiona Hill and the decorated Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman. Immigrants both, serving their adopted country at the highest level and at the cost of personal injury in the latter's case.  Vindman telling his father, scarred by Russia's methods of dealing with dissenters,

Dad, I’m sitting here today in the US Capitol talking to our elected professionals, is proof that you made the right decision 40 years ago to leave the Soviet Union, come here to the United States of America in search of a better life for our family. Do not worry. I will be fine for telling the truth.

Fiona Hill, daughter of coal miners in the north of England, insisting, 

This is a country of immigrants. With the exception of very few people still here, everyone immigrated to the U.S. at some point in their family history. This is what, for me, really does make America great.

Both statements brought me to tears (admittedly, it doesn't take much), I think because I once felt this way myself when I was younger, and because it had to be a covert emotion. Roger Cohen writes in the Times about the ideas I've wrestled with since I was a child: an emotional love for the place where I was born, and disgust with the injustice it perpetrates, i.e., patriotism. 

Let me give you a little of my background for context: On Dad's side, I'm a second-generation American. His folks emigrated from somewhere in Austro-Hungary (it was always a big secret, so I'm not sure where) and Dad was born here. Like Vindman, he joined the army (the Army-Air Corps then the Air Force) and fought in one of our wars (WWII), in his case, against people who spoke the same language his parents did (they were German-speaking Hungarians). Most of Mom's people, by contrast, have been here a very long time indeed, long enough to have left the American Colonies during the Revolutionary War to take up big land grants from King George in Canada. I'm not a Daughter of the American Revolution, but a Daughter of Union Empire Loyalists. At least one of the Canadians came back to the US to marry my Welsh-American Grandfather, whose family had been in Pennsylvania for a couple of generations, too. So I'm sort of the nexus of both aspects of American colonization and immigration: newcomer and founding colonialist. Add to this that as a Jehovah's Witness, I was supposed to not stand for the pledge (which I still don't; loyalty does not require pledges), not celebrate the 4th of July (boy that was tough in 1976), not vote, to have no loyalty but to God's Kingdom, and to be utterly neutral politically. Not just non-partisan; non-political.

That last one was a kicker. Politics and history, inextricably intertwined, were the number one topics of conversation in our house: Dad was a relentless FDR Dem; Mom, in a non-JW life, would have been even farther left. We supported unions, didn't cross picket lines. Dad voted fairly often and he and Mom always talked about who was running. Dad was also an inveterate writer of Letters to the Editor, mostly about politics and politicians, as well as local policy issues. Being retired WWII military and someone who got out when he saw what was happening in Vietnam informed a deeply ingrained sense of Honor and Right, the same kind Vindman exhibited and spoke about before Congress. You find this in a lot of career military people. They join up because of a real desire to Do the Right Thing, to give back and to serve in the only way they know how—with their lives. You see the same thing in many career diplomats and civil servants as well. They have a vision of a country and government that at least tries to Do the Right Thing, to make the world better, no matter how often or badly it fails, and they want to be part of that work.

It's no surprise Dad hated Nixon with a fiery hatred. I can only imagine what he'd say about T-Rump. There would be a lot of swearing. He hated Lieutenant Calley too, for sullying the uniform, so the recent pardoning of war criminals would result in much more swearing. He wasn't fond of the damn hippies, but he knew they were right about Vietnam, and supported their right to protest. Members of the KKK and the "goddamn John Birchers" were beneath his contempt. He was, nonetheless, ferocious in standing up for people's civil rights, especially if he didn't agree with them. "That's what I fought a war for," he'd say. Mom pretty much agreed with him, but extended her dislikes to most organized religion, except her own, fondly (and rather hilariously) quoting Marx's "religion is the opium of the people." She took any injustice in the world personally: racism, sexism, religious persecution, persecution by the religious, wage inequality, war—you name it, she hated it. I finally realized that the thing that appealed most to her about being a JW was the idea that Armageddon was a way to burn it all down and start over. I think she was really a thwarted Anarchist at heart. 

Both my folks were outraged by injustice, for different reasons. But I always think of Dad as one of the most patriotic people I knew. He couldn't care less about the Pledge of Allegiance, or the flag or the visible trappings people sport. He was a reluctant respecter of authority, so God help you if you abused that authority. Dirty cops, dirty politicians, war criminals, there wasn't anybody he hated more. He was a little guy and the little guy you didn't piss on. If you wanted to burn the flag as a protest, he'd support that. Free speech, freedom of religion, and the right to dissent were deeply important to him, but he was a "work within the system" guy. Mom was the one who wanted to see it all burned down and replaced with something better.

So here I am, raised by a couple of shit-stirrers and closet radicals. All the while I was clinging to being a JW, I was frustrated by their inaction and "giving it up to god" attitude that said humans were incapable of fixing anything. I was most frustrated, finally, that the attitude included poverty and hunger, which we manifestly can fix. It took me leaving my religion to become a card-carrying, out lefty. I pined in secret to go to anti-war protests, and finally went to my first march in college, the No Nukes rally in DC in 1979. That makes me proud in a way being directly connected to American colonialist history doesn't. I've always been, like Mom, a dissenter, and demanding, like Dad, that we as a society Do the Right Thing. One thing I'd never call myself is a patriot.

I've never had a good definition of patriotism, and it's always been a semi-dirty word to me because of how often it's trotted out in support of something really vile. The line about fascism coming to America wrapped in a flag and carrying in cross, whether Sinclair Lewis said it or not, is chillingly true. We're watching it happen. Every time T-Rump says "Make America Great Again," he's personifying what's worst about patriots and patriotism. It so often the refuge of fools and scoundrels, to justify acts that benefit no one but themselves and their increasingly tiny interest group of old white men. In that sense, the Patriot Act is aptly named, because it negates, in the name of "safety," the rights that are codified in the Constitution for everyone. 

This is part of what I wrestle with: the harm we've done and are still doing versus the good we try to do, the ideals we hold up and so often fail to uphold. I am heartened and touched by Vindman's belief that he will be okay telling the truth before Congress, even while the Army has had to relocate his family to a military base to keep them safe from the fucking Trump troglodyte MAGAites. It is still not the government coming after him and his family, as it would be in Russia, and that's what matters to him. I am heartened by the fact that Hill succeeded so well here when she couldn't because of the even more rampant classism in her country of birth, and touched that she decided to repay that opportunity by serving in the government. Her calling out of officials of the government she works for, right in public, in front of God, Country, and Everyone Else, to stop lying about Ukraine's meddling with the 2016 election—that's a patriotic act if ever there was one. 

And while that self-serving prick Devin Nunes insults him by not recognizing his rank as a serving U.S. Army officer, Vindman reiterates his belief in the U.S.:

As Vindman’s testimony neared the end, Sean Patrick Maloney, a Democrat from New York, asked the witness to reread the message he delivered to his father in his opening statement. He obliged....

“Why, then, do you have the confidence to “tell your dad not to worry?” Maloney asked.

“Congressman, because this is America,” he replied without hesitating. “This is the country I have served and defended, that all of my brothers have served. And here, right matters.”

Right matters. 

Maybe that's what patriotism is in a democracy: the dogged insistence that morality and ethics matter, that Doing the Right Thing is our duty, not a part but all of what being an American is, even if it means holding your leaders' feet to the fire of accountability in public. Maybe especially that. And to have two recent immigrants do that shows how important immigration is to who we are. Cohen, in his opinion piece on Fiona Hill, writes,

This [that American is a nation of immigrants] is the very revolutionary American idea under attack from Trump and his Republican enablers and the Fox News fabulists. Make America Great Again is, in fact, Deny What America Is.

The people who come here from all over the world—even from places we've helped ravage like Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam—come here with a sense of hope and idealism that we born-here citizens often have lost. Look at the new crop of immigrants, and first and second generation Americans newly elected to Congress, how they're tearing it up. They're tearing it up because they believe in the system. And what they believe of the system is that it's supposed to work for all of us, not just Big Business, not just stinking rich people. They believe that government's main job is to take care of its citizens, especially the most vulnerable of us, to lift us up, to protect us from the predatory and the greedy, to give us equal opportunities to succeed and pursue happiness. It's what I still believe and demand but don't expect. That these people are working for it when their colleagues on both sides of the aisle (with some exceptions) are not only shows how much we need immigrants to renew our democracy. That kind of faith in the process can only come from the young and from people who have experienced far worse times than most American citizens have. When you come from war, or genocide, or desperate hand to mouth poverty, or a land savaged by climate change, or authoritarian government, America still looks like a haven and a promise. People like these are not what Thomas Paine called Sunshine Patriots. They become, instead, our Winter Soldiers. 

And we need them because what's Right is grossly at odds with our practice of capitalism, which, unchecked and unregulated, is anything but Right. It's grossly at odds with the gospel of bootstrapping, as well. The idea that every person—regardless of skin color, sex, nation of origin, or any of the artificial labels we slap on each other—has a set of inalienable rights that a government cannot strip from you is the foundation of Right. Without getting into what the founders meant by "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," I think we're at least starting to accept the notion that the inalienable rights include the right to basic necessities, health care, and education, all of which are necessary to life and the pursuit of happiness. And you certainly don't have liberty without them. The freedom to starve, be homeless, and die young is not liberty.

And Right is grossly at odds with the two party system as it's in play now. Too many of the Democrats are in thrall to special interests and Money, especially when they call FDR's policies "radical left." And where to start with the Republicans? Where? Oh Lord. Let's just say, if you have to lie and cheat and allow others to break the law to stay in power, you are Wrong, not Right.

Sadly, we are currently being governed by the most Wrong administration ever, and opposing it is probably one of the most patriotic things we can do.  I fear that our democratic experiment is failing  and has been failing for a while now, a good part of my lifetime, every time we allowed money and/or power to matter more than people. And that experiment matters because people's lives matter. The whole point of civilization and government is to make people's lives better. Everything else is gravy.

So, patriot or not? If dissent is patriotic, then yes. If I need a flag for it, then no. Unless I can burn it.

Closed Borders

Prick us
and we bleed
like all animals.|
And prick each other
we do
with guns and bombs and
fear most of all
until we see an enemy
everywhere
who does not look like us
as though our own tribe
were not capable
of the same atrocities.
Like the snailwe pull ourselves inside
our imaginary walls
and close the doors—
or think we can.
But the guns and bombs
are just tools,
the real enemy not other people.

When we look at each other
only through borders
we can’t see
what a wide and splendid world it is.

–For Beirut and Baghdad and Gaza and Paris, Nov. 14, 2015

The Valorization of the (Academic) 1%

Jason Brennan is at it again (Wayback machine link, just in case, because Jason has a bad habit of deleting anything that receives criticism he doesn't like) and I've decided to tackle him here, rather than on the NFM blog, because it's a waste of NFM resources to reply directly to this nonsense. But I'm happy to waste my own resources doing it. School doesn’t start for another week.

A quick recap: Brennan (PDF) surfaced a few months ago with an article (now deleted; see above) about how adjuncts (more on that term later) are responsible for their own suffering by agreeing to teach for poverty wages, when they could just go sell insurance instead (hence the moniker Prof. Geico). Not only is Brennan likely to delete his posts if they get too much of the wrong kind of attention, but he’ll delete comments he doesn’t like and both he and his crony Phillip Magness aren’t above closing of the comments portion of their blogs altogether while freely commenting on dissenting venues themselves. Brennan, as his group blog indicates, fancies himself a "bleeding heart Libertarian," which seems largely like an exercise in contradiction, since Libertarian hearts bleed for no one but themselves. In his new essay, "The Valorization of Envy," he proudly calls himself an "academic 1-percenter" whose work is certainly NOT made possible by the underclass of adjuncts teaching general education classes to free him up for research. That's probably more true now that adjuncts at his home institution of Georgetown have unionized.

Before we go much farther, a word or three about the term "adjuncts," especially as it comes into play with a crony of Brennan's, Phillip Magness, whom I also wish to address here. Within adjunct activist circles, the word "adjunct" covers a world of hurt: it generally includes any contingent faculty whose working conditions are precarious and untenured and/or off the tenure track: full-time contract professors and program managers with some benefits and security but almost always lower pay than tenured or tenure-track; part-time professors with extended contracts, paid by the credit hour; part-time professors hired semester to semester or "just in time"; part-time instructors who have full time jobs in industry (the original meaning of the term); part time instructors who rely solely on academic work for their income; visiting professors; graduate teaching assistants; postdocs. There are a number of terms used to refer to these working conditions: adjunct lecturer, adjunct professor, adjunct instructor, adjunct assistant professor, instructor, lecturer—you get the idea. In Canada and Australia, they are called sessionals, in the UK, fractionals. The problem with the terms is that universities are free to call these workers whatever they want, so there is no single term that covers them all or all the different positions they occupy. The commonality is in the precarity and exploitative nature of their positions, in contrast to the (now less so) security of tenured faculty, who, no matter how the statistics are cooked, remain a mere 25% of the faculty (down from 70%). So when I say "adjunct" in this essay, the term includes all these various working conditions. I'll come back to this when I address Magness's specious arguments.

On to Jason Brennan's newest essay.

In "The Valorization of Envy," Brennan sets out to critique Richard Goldin's Counterpunch essay, "The Economic Inequality in Academia." First, let me just say what a dick it makes you seem if you think that people working for equality and fairness in society are merely envious of "people like you." It also makes you look stupidly arrogant if you think everyone who's not like you envies you. It's like reducing Freud's concept of penis envy to the envy of the actual organ rather than the undeserved social power it represents. It's a juvenile argument that should be confined to the playground, but it's also one rooted in a deep fear that the people working for social and economic justice will redistribute the wealth before you get yours. And in a deep hatred of the very concept of equality. But enough of the free armchair shrinkage. Brennan's undoubtedly got a good health plan that would pay for the professional variety. But he'd have to admit his insecurities first.  

Reducing Goldin's analysis to an "envious rant," as I just reduced Brennan’s critique to a juvenile argument filled with ad hominem insinuations, doesn't replace sound argumentation. It's fun, but it proves nothing, and it really has no place in the academic conversation. Attributing motive and making personal attacks are the kinds of tactics used by those without solid ground to stand on. So let's see what kind of ground Brennan's on.

First we get the argument that there aren't as many adjuncts as the activists like New Faculty Majority (characterized on Phil Magness's twitter feed, especially me personally, as "crazy cat ladies") claim, for which, see above. Brennan cites his pal Magness, who makes artificial divisions based on the vague nomenclature used by under-reporting universities to characterize their precarious faculty. Aaron Barlow of AAUP's Academe blog posted a host of graphs to refute this, but again, it depends on how you define adjunct faculty. Unless Brennan and Magness agree to stipulate that non-tenure-track full-time faculty share issues with "just in time" part-time adjuncts, there's not much more to be said.

Part of Brennan and Magness's refutation of this idea of commonality is their focus on R1 universities like their respective institutions, Georgetown and George Mason. I'm not sure why they're so blinkered about this, except that they both work in such institutions. They are a small fraction of the total number of higher education institutions (around 400 or so out of approximately 4,700 total, not counting the for-profit sector). Where R1s fail to employ Magness's narrow definition of adjuncts, they happily employ and exploit graduate assistants and postdocs. More than one college has cut the number of part-time instructors to replace them with grad TAs because TAs come even cheaper and have a harder time unionizing because of their student status.

Next, Brennan claims that "contrary to what everyone keeps saying, the number of tenure-track faculty slots has been increasing over the past 40 years." Nobody has said this. What we have said is that the proportion of non-tenure track to tenure track has been increasing. That's a big difference. Furthermore, the table he and Magness cite as proof actually shows the proportion of full-time to part-time, without any tenure distinctions at all. We can assume that part-timers are not tenured or tenure-track, but we cannot assume that all full-timers are tenured or tenure-track. But that same table shows the proportion of part-time to full-time hires narrowing drastically until they are neck in neck. So even if only half of those full-timers are untenured, the growth of untenured is still outstripping tenured. Here's a better graph illustrating that growth. Note the growing proportion of non-tenure-track faculty of both kinds, just from the turn of the century. It's even greater from the 1970s.

Next, after some more fun but semantically null snarkiness about postmodernists and Koch infiltration and accusations of lying about making minimum wage (the credit hour fallacy, anyone?) Brennan turns the lens back on himself again, reminding us that he is an "Academic 1 percenter":

I’m not making bank because Georgetown exploits adjuncts.  Martin Gilens isn’t making bank because Princeton exploits adjuncts. R. Edward Freeman doesn’t make bank because Darden exploits adjuncts. Rather, the exploited adjuncts are getting exploited elsewhere, at community colleges, small liberal arts colleges, third tier/low output “research” universities, and the for-profit colleges.

The implication, of course, is that Brennan's "making bank" because he's an academic hotshot.

First, I would ask him how many general education courses he teaches, and if the answer is none, who does teach them. Because that's generally where the adjuncts are. And because the adjuncts are teaching the most time-intensive courses with the most grading, that frees him up to do his research, while adjuncts, often scrambling between two or three institutions, have no time or monetary support to do research. While anybody can apply for a Fulbright, adjuncts are generally ineligible for travel funds to go to conferences and for sabbaticals to have time to pursue their own projects. That's just as true at Georgetown as anywhere else. In fact, Georgetown's own Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor produced a report that illustrates this. (See especially pages 9 & 10.) If Georgetown pays its adjuncts better than most places, it's because their union helped negotiate a good contract and because Georgetown has a long history of just employment practices as part of its Catholic ethos. Brennan seems not to realize that he benefits from those too, but more so than his adjunct colleagues. FYI, Dr. Brennan, Georgetown employs about 650 adjuncts. That's hardly the "few" that you claim. Perhaps they are invisible to you in your elite tower.

The next bit of Brennan's argument is largely an ego-driven assertion of the supremacy of research over teaching, of the sort I've heard before from people who don't like teaching. It's a chicken-and-egg argument without winners. They're both equally important. Some people do one better than the other, but it's impossible to say that research hasn't been overvalued in the academy when someone like Peter Higgs, of Higgs boson fame, asserts that "It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964" with the pressure of publication currently in vogue.

Brennan then complains about Goldin's characterization of academic hiring practices as a lottery. I can see why Brennan doesn't like this, as it makes his own hiring look less merit-based. Again, that's not actually what Goldin says though. He calls it "something of a lottery" (a difference without much distinction, true) but then goes on to explain that hiring committees have been found to pretty much replicate themselves in their hiring practices: white, male, Ivy. It's one of the major problems in STEM disciplines, especially physics.

Finally, Brennan gripes peevishly, "If madjunct crowd [sic; adjunct activists] sincerely believed that academia is a lottery, they would not act surprised or indignant that they lost and would move on with their lives." In other words, just shut up and take what we hand you, whether you think it's just or not. I've got mine, fuck all y'all. This is apparently the best argument Brennan and his Libertarian tag-team partner Magness can make, because neither of them can do data analysis for shit.

In many ways, all of this is beside the point. The core issue here is the uncollegiality of Brennan and Magness’s attitude. As fellow educators, what is the point of their hostility to financial and labor equity for their colleagues? Or is it that they don't really see adjuncts as their colleagues? (Ironic in Magness's case, because he is one.) The phrase that comes to mind is “punching down,” because none of the people this dynamic duo are griping and complaining about have any power to do anything against Brennan and Magness but what I’ve just done: excoriate them in public via an obscure blog or some other publication. What they’re doing is a bit like kicking puppies. Or crazy cat ladies.

So what makes you all such shitheads? What are you afraid of if adjuncts gain equity in pay and position? Why waste your time on people who are virtually powerless? Why the name calling and derision? Who took your toys, boys?

 Crazy Cat Lady, huh?

You want Crazy Cat Lady? Here. Let me get my Docs on.

 

 UPDATE: Phil Magness responds on Twitter (where I have been blocked) with more of his usual selective editing and complete lack of cogency. I guess I hurt his feefees, but it's okay if he slams an entire class of colleagues.

 

 

Failure of Leadership: Money, Power, Privilege

I'm generally a big picture kind of person, though my own focus for activism right now is pretty narrow. In case you haven't been watching my every move, I've been spending the last couple of years concentrating on education labor activism but my personal impulse is to be outraged by every sort of injustice: racism, sexism, homophobia, economic inequality, war, greed, you name it, I'm pissed about it. I've always believed that everyone should have equal opportunity, a fair and level playing field, and the right to be treated in every way with dignity as fellow human beings.

I have to give my parents credit for that. In many ways, they were a lot like Alice Dreger's Polish emigre parents. My dad was a working class, old school FDR/JFK Liberal and my mother was a deeply religious woman constantly outraged by injustice. Dad's belief in civil rights and free speech were unshakable and he had a real soft spot for underdogs, even if it did take him a while to come around to feminism. Mom was more the avenging angel type and would have gladly carried one of those Biblical flaming swords, had they been issued to mere mortals. So I grew up in a kind of Truth, Justice and the American Way household, without the jingoistic patriotism. In my house, everybody deserved respect and a fair break. Is that so hard?

It sure seems to be. And I've been thinking a lot about why, lately, as I get ready to teach my research course that focuses on economic inequality this summer. Human failing is the obvious "Duh!" reason for injustice, or what we more frequently call human nature. We have it in us to be absolutely selfish, vile shits, but we also have it in us to be amazingly altruistic. The sheer number of beautiful, generous, uplifting things we do for each other is one of the best parts of the internet, along with cat videos. We make cheap artificial limbs for kids and dogs. As individuals, we collect massive amounts of money for the victims of natural disasters. We turn our ingenuity to making the lives of refugees and the poor easier. We get out in the street and protest injustice even when popular opinion is against us, changing those opinions in the process.

And still, what we see in the news, and in our lives, is a grossly unequal and unjust world where far too few people hold not just most of the money, but all the cards. Two immediate examples, one petty, one part of an ongoing battle: New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's administration spawned, among other scandals, something called Bridgegate, in which Christie's cronies "conspir[ed] with Bill Baroni and Bridget Anne Kelly to close the lanes at the George Washington Bridge in 2013 to 'punish' the mayor of Fort Lee for not endorsing Christie in his re-election bid." This doesn't sound like much; traffic sucks in New York and New Jersey most of the time anyway. But this was an intentional obstruction that created a public safety hazard and held up EMS vehicles, resulting in at least one death. Christie and his cronies grossly inconvenienced and endangered thousands of drivers and helped cause the death of a 91-year old woman because somebody didn't play pattycake with them.

I'll just let that sink in for a moment.

The second example, much more immediate and appalling is the death of Freddie Gray while in the custody of the Baltimore Police Department. Charges have just come down today against six police officers who not only illegally arrested Gray, but then proceeded to beat the crap out of him somehow in the back of the van he was being transported in. It's too early to say exactly what happened, but it seems clear that neither Mr. Gray's safety nor dignity were paramount in the minds of the cops who picked him up. His pleas for help were ignored and he was not secured safely in the back of the van. Somehow, he acquired a spinal injury that killed him between the time he was cuffed and when he arrived at the station. The New York Times has highlighted a practice called the "rough ride" or the "nickle ride" used all over the country to rough up suspects without having to physically touch them, a form of torture not quite as egregious as that practiced by the Chicago Police Department but nonetheless abhorrent.

A third example, larger and even more systemic than the deaths of black people at the hands of police, is the denial of living wages to workers all over the world, and the sequestration of the majority of wealth in the hands of a few, and the way that gets talked about by others with relative privilege. Far too often, as in the case of this white, male, privileged tenure track asshat, it leads to a rhetoric of blaming the victim for the very injustices under which they are suffering. Likewise this equally phantasmagoric piece by David Brooks, in which he asserts that poverty is not really about lack of money but social psychology. The poor are poor because they want to be, because they're lazy, because they're incapable of taking "advantage" of a broken public school system handed over to shysters, an overpriced higher education system that leaves them tens of thousands of dollars in debt, or of non-existent living wage jobs. Meanwhile, living in poverty has a whole host of deleterious physical, psychological, educational and social effects. So, we fuck children up by not helping to provide secure, healthy living conditions and then blame them for failing. It's a brilliant strategy with all kinds of denial of responsibility built in.

This is where we come to the title of this post. All of these examples illustrate a failure of leadership—or the success of a certain kind of leadership inimical to the welfare of the people these leaders are supposed to be serving. If we posit the idea that political life in a democracy (hell, any political life), especially leadership, should be grounded in morality, compassion, and justice, then the leaders have, in these cases, failed spectacularly. Or succeeded in upholding a morally bankrupt, bigoted, unjust social order. Take your pick.

Humans are herd animals, by and large. We like to be together, we like to be led, we like to follow for the most part (see also: crowd theory). Even so, we are rightly suspicious of the motives of leaders who emerge from the crowd. Lord Acton famously said "Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." What seems to actually be true is that the exercise of power heightens already existing personality traits. If we are compassionate, moral people when we're given power or find ourselves in power, we tend to exercise it with those qualities in mind to the best of our abilities. Nobody's perfect, but we've had some truly compassionate presidents in my lifetime, and before (FDR, JFK and Jimmy Carter all come to mind, despite their human failings). We've had plenty of the other kind too: the sorts who are more interested in power and personal advantage than they are in service to their countrymen or anyone else. I don't think you need examples of those. *Cough*Bush-Cheney*Cough*

Money, however, seems to have a more universally deleterious effect on people. Money creates a buffer between us and the rest of the world. When we have enough of it to live comfortably, it reduces stress and makes our lives easier and healthier (see above). It also allows and encourages us to be generous. Poor and middle class people give larger percentages of their income to charity than the wealthy and uber-wealthy do. Anything in excess of a comfortable income seems to turn us into greedy asshats for whom there is never enough money. We think, hey, I've made it; I don't care about the rest of you. This kind of contempt is the polar opposite of what we should want from our leaders, whether they are political, financial, or intellectual leaders. Sadly, that's mostly what we've got now: police departments that see a large proportion of the people they serve as insurgents; educational leaders who see children as nascent criminals and sources of income; political leaders who see citizens as potential terrorists and their own nation as a battleground; business leaders who see natural resources as exploitable commodities.

Leaders like Chris Christie and the chiefs of particularly abusive police departments foster an atmosphere of contempt in which abuse, selfishness and cruelty thrive. Christie is known for being a particularly petty jerk who verbally abuses constituents who challenge his god-like self image. It's not surprising that his administration should cook up a juvenile scheme like Bridgegate. That's the kind of tone that Christie sets; he has all the diplomacy and maturity of a 12-year-old schoolyard bully. Likewise, the kinds of police chiefs who look the other way when their officers brutalize or racially profile the public they're supposed to "serve and protect" foster contempt for their own communities. Broken Windows policing sounds good in theory, but without including respect for the people in those communities, it fosters the idea that everyone who lives there is currently a thug, practicing to be a thug, or used to be a thug and might be again at any moment. We then stray far from the principle of innocent until proven guilty and common sense, not to mention the spirit of the law. And if our elected leaders allow the (often useful) paranoia of intelligence agencies to be the pervading attitude toward our nation's citizens, that fosters distrust, hatred, and disrespect of everyone who does not look like "us." Who that "us" might be in a nation of immigrants from all over the world eludes me, but there are plenty of "others" to go around in the minds of the frightened. Right now, it's Muslims who are the potential terrorists of choice, even though lone wolf homegrown white supremacists like Timothy McVeigh are far more dangerous.

What concerns me most in all of these examples is the almost complete lack of compassion for our fellow citizens. More and more we as both nation and individuals are exhibiting not just a lack of compassion but an outright contempt for others who have less power, less money, less luck, less stuff, less education, less privilege than we do, whoever we are. We are "punching down" more instead of lifting up. In the courses I teach, we talk about inequality and social violence of many kinds. Most of my students are first generation college students (like me); many are first generation Americans (like my dad). Most of them buy into the "work hard, get ahead" American dream and are shocked to discover it is out of reach for most of us. But when they read about the fraying safety net we have, they immediately bring up welfare queens and foodstamp fraud, even though many of them have used those services themselves. The rhetoric of our privileged leaders is teaching these kids not to work hard but to hate themselves and their families for failing when they can't realize the return on their own investments. It's hiding from them who the true culprits of their oppression are and turning them against each other. It's an excellent tactic for social control and our leaders are making very good use of it.

But this doesn't let the rest of us off the hook. We're currently living in a society that lionizes socio- and psychopathic personalities. If you think I'm exaggerating, think about who we admire most: hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, bankers—none of whom actually produce anything—the Forbes 400, most of whom (with some notable exceptions) are vile, exploitative creeps. Example: The Koch brothers (numbers 3 & 4), the Walton family (numbers 6, 7, 9 and 10). Even when they mean well, as I suspect Bill Gates (#1 with $81B) does, money seems to give them an excess of paternalism that is completely misplaced, as though knowing how to make a fortune means you have the intelligence to solve all the world's problems, or even know when there is a problem. Gates's meddling in education is a prime example. According to Bill, our public education system is failing and needs the expertise of Microsoft's genius to fix it. Instead of listening to actual experts in the field—you know, people who've been educators their whole lives, who have degrees in it, and years of study and experience—we should let Bill tell us what's wrong and how to fix it. And now we are eviscerating public education, and firing our best teachers on the basis of an untried testing regime that makes kids hate learning. But that's another post.

Worse than the moneymakers are the politicians, like Christie, that they buy with those billions: ultra conservatives like Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Michele Bachmann, Bobby Jindal, the Bush boys who apparently really hate poor people, women, minorities, immigrants, or anyone who can't give them money for reelection. Why do we elect these people? Evil must have better PR. We're not just voting for them though. We're validating their frightened, narrow, cruel worldview and often parroting it. We're encouraging their failed leadership and becoming part of the problem.

Stop voting for petty, mean, selfish assholes, people, lest you become their victims. Better yet, maybe it's about time the compassionate, honest people who care about justice showed the leaders we've got now how it's done.

Shock Parents! Enlighten Students! Embarrass Badmin!

Tell your stories to PrecariCorps in 300-500 words. What's PrecariCorps and why should you care? If you're an adjunct professor anywhere, you know what the wages and treatment are like. Unless you're the kind of adjunct who has a full-time industry job and moonlights because you like to teach, you're making poverty-level wages for those contact hours, teaching up to 9 classes at multiple universities/colleges/on-line for profit diploma mills to make ends meet with no guarantee you'll have anything to teach next semester, let alone next year or over the summer. This is the new academic precariat and we're 75% of the faculty now. Our wages are a fraction of what similarly credentialed experts make in industry, yet we often can't get jobs outside academe because we're overqualified. That's a fine Catch-22, yet many members of the public don't know that their tuition dollars are not going to our salaries, or that their taxes are subsidizing us the same way we're subsidizing WalMart workers: via social services we need to pay our bills: Obamacare, food stamps, unemployment (if we can get it), WIC and other forms of welfare.

That's where PrecariCorps comes in. Their primary purpose is "Improving Lives and Livelihoods of Contingent Faculty with Hardship Relief Funds or Grants for Faculty Development. To accomplish our first goal, PrecariCorps will offer contingent faculty donations through one of our programs, the Hardship Relief Fund or the Grant for Faculty Development. Applicants may email a completed application to receive either a donation to help them pay one bill or help them travel to one conference." To this end, they're applying for 501(c)(3) status as a charitable organization.

Think about that for a minute. Imagine if public school teachers in pre-K-12 were dependent upon charitable donations to survive while doing their jobs, instead of making a middle class living (though that has become more rare now too). Imagine if engineers, doctors, pharmacists, lawyers and other highly qualified professionals were in the same boat. Would you want a doctor who couldn't pay off her med school bills and had to scramble for work among four or five different offices, never knowing where they'd be and making it impossible to see the same doctor twice? Oh wait, that's what it's like at many clinics for the poor. And we see how well that works by the mortality rates for the poor.

At the same time, professional administrators make many times what adjunct professors do, and never set foot in the classroom, never do the real work of a university, which is education. At many institutions of higher education, there are now twice as many administrators as faculty, full-time or otherwise. Twice as many.

Guess where that tuition money is going.

So to my mind, a large part of PrecariCorps purpose is to highlight the shame of our academic system which is being sucked dry by an overabundance of parasitical administrative positions at the cost of the quality of some of the best education in the world. Hungry, stressed, impoverished teachers don't and can't do their best work when they're worried about survival. No one does. It's time we decided who was more important in higher education and start supporting our educators and not via charity.

The problem of allies: lead, follow, or get out of the way

So yesterday, on Facebook, I posted this synopsis of my proverbial (Thanks, Alex Kudera!) long day without much comment:

Here's my day as a adjunct today; it's not typical but it's not unusual, either:
9-10:30--commute to York College, Queens
10:30-12--office hours (paid), class prep
12-1:50--Class
1:50-3:30--commute to New Jersey
3:30-5--union executive committee meeting (paid; which I'll be a half hour or so late for)
5:00-6:00--commute to Manhattan
6:00-8:00--mandatory (paid) faculty meeting
8:00-9:30--commute home

I do this periodically to make my life as an adjunct instructor visible to people that it's usually invisible to, and who should know about it because my working conditions affect them: students, parents, the general public. Later, two good friends, people I love dearly, both tenured full professors, asked me the equally proverbial "why do I do it?" question. My pissy response after that long day was this:

Why do I do it? Why do you do the work you do? Why do you teach in China for $3,000? Why did you take the job as assessment officer? Why did you keep going back to academe when it was so hard to get a job? Why do anything worth doing? I and other adjuncts get tired of answering that question. We do it because the job is worth doing and because we want to see others paid what we're worth. Nothing changes if the only response is to leave and let it be someone else's problem. That's what full time faculty have done for the last 30 years. That's how we got in this mess. That's not a question an ally asks. The real question is why I should have to do this when you don't.

I'm pretty sure I hurt some feelings with this response, but as an activist-educator, I can't pass up the chance to use this as an object lesson to allies. I've confronted this question before in real life and in a performance piece I wrote. It comes up all the time in the adjunct world and it's one of the weapons used against us by management/administration and the entrenched privileged. "Why do you keep letting yourself be exploited? Why don't you just get another job?" My friends asked me this out of concern for my health both physical and financial, and I love them for that, but as academics I wish they were also more my allies in this struggle. Because their words make it harder, not easier, to keep doing what I'm doing.

One of the first lessons I learned as a baby feminist in the 70s was the slogan "The personal is political." The conditions of my life as an adjunct and as a union activist really can't be separated from my personal life. Those conditions are my personal life. Teaching is as much a part of my identity as being a writer or a feminist is. Like my tenured colleagues, I sank a lot of time, money, and effort (though not as much as they) into becoming an educator. Whenever I could (i.e, whenever I could afford it), I kept coming back to it because it felt like vital work, and because it was soul-filling and not soul-sucking like the far more lucrative job of writing advertising copy was. I want a return on my educational investment that makes me feel like I'm doing something worthwhile, not perpetuating a sick, exploitative system. Because even while I'm signing those sick, exploitative contracts, I'm subverting that system every time I walk into a classroom and open my mouth.

Asking me why I keep doing what I do isn't the same as asking how I keep doing it, or commiserating with my exploitation. Because when that question is personal, it places the responsibility back on me rather than on the system that exploits me, with the subtext that I could walk away if I wanted to. That's why that question pisses adjuncts off: because nobody asks why Tenured and Tenure-Track profs don't walk away when they don't get raises or are denied tenure or when administration exploits them by squeezing more administrative work out of them for the same money. Somehow, tenure has not only given academics security, but a right to love their jobs that adjunct and contingent faculty often don't seem to have (more on this in a later post). (And please don't say this in response. Please. Just don't.)

Phrased another way, "why do you do it?" reads as "why don't you get another job?" But an ally asks, "what can I do to help change this system that exploits you?" Or, if you're a local ally, "how can I support you, personally, if not professionally, in making this better?" And why should I be supported? Yes, this is a choice I made, and continue to make every time I sign an exploitative teaching contract, but it's no different from the choices that people working for justice everywhere make, whether it's working for Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, or some other activist NGO, or on a political campaign. People who work in the non-profit world don't often make a lot of money. Many of them go into dangerous situations to do what they do, and risk death, imprisonment, or torture to help others. Do I really need to remind anyone what civil rights marchers, anti-war protestors, or even the Occupiers of Zucotti Park faced? Social change does not happen without risk and sacrifice. Continuing to work as an adjunct and as an activist at the same time is my risk and my sacrifice.

I'm not trying to sound all noble here; my risk is relatively low by comparision, and mostly economic. But it's precisely because I don't have dependents and haven't sunk all my apples into a Ph.D. basket that I feel I need to be one of the people in this fight. Many of my adjunct activist colleagues are single parents with kids to support and massive student debt, or people who don't have a partner (like me) to support them, or people whose partners don't make a lot of money either. My personal risk is pretty low, so I need to take a stand in this fight. It doesn't cost me much except personal security and time, and I've always lived on the economic edge, mostly by choice, though also because of the same wage exploitation that we're all suffering from.

Which brings up another point: how interconnected this fight is with economic justice for the dying middle class, of which my colleagues are a part, and the increasing numbers of working poor. Many of my colleagues from grad school teach at institutions that serve the working poor and have watched their school's tuition go up and up and up until it is crippling and as unobtainable as an Ivy League school. Student debt load is killing our economy and crippling a generation of students. Administration ties that debt to poor adjunct salaries, as in, "if we pay you a living wage, we'll have to raise tuition." If we don't expose this lie, we're doing our students and our society a grave disservice. And we're falling down on the job as educators. We are, instead, modelling economic and intellectual poverty and complacency for our students, instead of enaging with the political and economic realities of the world around us.*

This is why I do it: Because I can. Because I must. With or without your support.

 

*Oh, by the way, Nicholas Kristof: you want engaged academics? Come meet my adjunct activist friends.

Thinking about the UIC Strike

Right now, professors and adjunct professors at the University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC) are on strike to (among other things) protest the lack of a contract they've been trying to negotiate for more than a year with the administration. There was a time when higher education didn't need unions and when professors largely took care of the internal governance themselves, so the necessity of strikes was small. Now, everything has changed because universities and colleges are increasingly being run on a business model. But that model, clunky as it is elsewhere is a particularly bad fit for education institutions.

Why does our society only have a worker/manager dichotomy to describe how we make a living? It clearly doesn't apply to all the ways we work. Part of the problem with organizing the work of universities is that the law sees professors as managers. Who are we managing? Students? They're not workers; they're "consumers." Each other? Then how can we be managers? Oh, wait; that leaves the *adjuncts.* They don't manage anything and all they do is work. But what do the administration do? Aren't they managers? What are they managing? They're not managing the professors because we manage each other. They're not managing students because students are consumers. Oh wait: that leaves the *adjuncts.* No wonder administration wants more adjuncts. It makes the worker/manager delineation clearer for them.

And this is why a business model for education does not work. Education is a co-op. There is no owner of an educational "company" at a university. We see how poorly for-profit schools where there is an owner do the job. Boards of trustees exist to insure not just the financial health of the institution, but its ability to carry out its mission. Administration is not "in the business" of providing education, because education is not a service or a product. It's a cooperative endeavor between student and teacher with a largely intangible, unmeasurable result: the creation of knowledge. You can't "sell" that. You can only acquire it through personal investment of time and skullsweat, while others help you develop it and nurture it. When you pay teachers, you are supporting them in "work" that's intangible and unmeasurable, but which has a social value beyond any product and which forms the basis of all other tangible products. Starve teachers and you starve the nation and its economy. Fail to support teachers, whether K-12 or higher ed, adequately, and you do the same.

Another Adjunct Story

I've been teaching as a regular career again for about five years now, occasionally supplemented by freelance work, and been an activist and vocal shit-stirrer on behalf of adjunct faculty for about two years, beginning when I joined the union at New Jersey City University. In some ways, I'm not the typical adjunct story: I've worked in industry and made a good living, even working part time; I have a Master's degree (an MA, not a terminal MFA) not a Ph.D., which means that I'll probably never get any kind of tenure; I like teaching the general ed courses of composition and intro to lit and could settle down there happily. What gives me common cause with my Ph.D.-bearing sisters and brothers is the shit pay we get for the jobs we do, and the lousy working conditions that affect not just us, but our students. But before this, I've never really felt like I had a personal reason to complain, beyond that. I didn't have a dramatic story of deprivation. 

Until my landlady decided to sell the condo I'm renting from her. Now I have a story.

I moved in here ten years ago when I was working part-time as a marketer for an environmental consulting company doing booming business. I didn't have benefits, but I took home $48,000/year and was vested in the company pension plan. I travelled a bit, bought some nice furniture, made a nice home for myself. That all changed, as it did for many people, around 2008, which is when I got downsized and started teaching again. My savings dwindled because I was making about half of what I had been, and my previously non-existent credit card debt shot up. And I don't mean it shot up because I was buying stuff I didn't need. It shot up because I was buying food and paying for medical care, which starts to happen more frequently when you're staring down or staring at the back side of 50. But even with my credit cards, I'm in less debt than most people. I live pretty frugally. I don't have dependents (aside from my elderly and temperamental cat, but that's another story). I don't even want a lot of things anymore. My major purchases now are books and cheap stuff to make art with, and the occasional train ticket to Maine. My credit card debt is my only debt (no house, no car, no education debts), but I can't get out from under it because of how little I make, and I keep racking it up, also because of how little I make and the precarious nature of the work I do.

But now that my landlady is selling, I don't have the money for a new lease (first and last month's rent, security deposit, broker's fee) saved up, or money for movers. Fortunately, my landlady is also a good friend and she and her wife are helping me out with fees and such, and other friends are loaning me money for moving expenses, because at 53, I'm too damn old to do UHaul. If it weren't for my friends and landlady, I would probably be SOL and have to sell or store everything I own and move to a tiny, shitty studio.

This is a story that a lot of people can tell you, about the slide down the financial ladder from the middle class. I was never very far up that ladder to begin with, which was fine, but when you're not, the bottom is a lot closer, and lot easier to get to, and my education was supposed to be what kept me off the bottom. But now, in our free-market world that rewards greed as "hard work," my hard work and education, and the hard work and education of millions of others, goes unrewarded, and in the case of students and especially those who go for advanced degrees, it's now punished with enormous amounts of debt.

I was lucky to escape that bit, but I'm being screwed, like so many others, by the new mantra that the business world has made sacred: profit at all costs. And that profit is not to the people who do the actual work. It's profit for people who already had money to invest in other people's work. It's profit made on the backs of all kinds of working people, from Wal-Mart's obscene billions subsidized by government aid to its workers who live on subsistence wages, to trained freelancers bilked of wages or made to wait months for payments and having to fund their own retirement and healthcare, to highly educated college professors whose wages are stolen from us by the lie that we only work in the classroom, and by a low value on that.

There's a rather naive tendency in this country to tell people like me to just shut up and get another job, without realizing that many of us have sunk years of our lives into educations to do this job. It's not like we all graduated at 22 and went out into the work world. Our training goes on far longer than in most professions and our careers don't even get started, if we go straight through with no breaks to raise more money, until we are in our early 30s. Many of us, like my friend Rob who just got tenure for the first time at the age of 50 didn't start our teaching careers fully until we were into our 40s, because of the prevalence of contingent labor like me. That contingent labor exists, not because there's a plethora of cheap labor as the freemarketers would have you believe, but because there is a dearth of funding for the full-time jobs that should sustain the educational enterprise.

Where's that funding going? Part of the problem is lack of funding from the government for education, except when it comes to profitable student loans. But a good deal of tuition, which has been rising faster than inflation, goes to administration salaries (some of them exorbitant), luxury campus buildings, and high-tech teaching tools which are often invested in with the final goal of replacing those pesky human teachers. And it goes into the pockets of trustees who are turning our universities into job training camps for their industries, and saving them the cost of having to train their workforce, and who sell the universities buildings and tech they don't need.

I'm not talking about fairness here. I know life isn't fair; but neither does it need to be nasty, brutish and short anymore. I'm talking about morals and ethics and the kind of civilization we want to be living in and building. Or perhaps I am talking about a particular kind of fairness. Educators and working people are not asking for excessive amounts of money. We're asking to be compensated fairly for the work we do. "Fairly" in this case, means a sustainable, living wage for everyone, so that no one requires a government subsidy unless something catastrophic happens. My fellow educators and I have invested a great deal of money and time in making sure we are equipped to do one of the most vital jobs of civilization, especially a democratic society: not job training, but the education of citizens and the collaborative creation of new knowledge that drives advances in technology, medicine, law, and the other engines of a civilized world. Business and money alone do not create civilization, clearly. But well-educated citizens do.

What this means for me, personally, is to have some job security, a regular paycheck for more than 8 months of the year, to make wages on par with my full-time colleagues, to be able to participate in the educational community of the university I work for, to buy books without counting pennies, to be able to move without borrowing money from friends who work in the business world, to be the best educator and person I can be with the skills that I have. I would like the "luxury" (and it has become a luxury now) of being able to contribute to the future well-being of my society by educating young minds without going into debt I can never repay, relying on a government handout, or living with the threat of homelessness.

If that seems like whining, you're probably one of the barbarians at the gate.

The Deprofessionalization of Educators

Okay, for my second post of the year, I'm getting out the scrunchie.

I’ve been an educator off and on for about 10 years. The off and on part isn’t because I lack credentials, or lack the ability to hold a job, or because I’ve left for greener pastures. I’ve left teaching over and over again because I cannot make a living doing one of the things I love most, one of the things that I’m really good at. I’m an adjunct college instructor with a Master’s degree in English.

Education, especially post-secondary education, is an odd profession. To practice it, one must be highly credentialed, an expert in both the subject matter and the ability to impart one’s knowledge to or create that knowledge in others. And yet, teaching is a lot like writing: everyone thinks they can do it just as well as the professionals. In no other professional sector do the public and government officials feel free to tell the experts how to do their jobs.

Our society expects much from educators, as it should, but it doesn’t really think our job is that difficult, and it doesn’t really trust the professionals to do it as well as we know we can. If they did, there would be less bureaucracy, less demand that we quantify the unquantifiable, and less legislation governing our practices in the classroom. Imagine legislating the methods Boeing engineers have to use to develop new aircraft. Absurd, right? But what teachers at all levels do in a classroom every day is just as complicated and complex. We’re engineering minds, something both far more malleable and far more friable than any material aircraft engineers work with. And yet there is more jiggering of the work environment and requirements by non-experts than in just about any other profession, except, possibly, doctors providing women’s healthcare.

No other profession gets told how to do its day-to-day job as much as teachers do. Imagine telling a doctor or nurse how to dispense healthcare: what pills to prescribe, what tests to run, what course of treatment to follow. To be sure, insurance companies attempt to do this with their pay guidelines, but doctors often successfully buck against it by appealing to their own expertise. Who, after all is the doctor? Now, imagine telling an engineer how to build a hydroelectric dam. Imagine telling an airline pilot how to fly the plane. That’s what people do with teachers, even teachers who are literally masters and doctors. If universities are becoming obsolete, and I argue that they are not, it’s because they’ve lost their focus because of pundits and the inexpert, not their usefulness.

David Brooks, for example, makes me apoplectic when he talks about education. He confuses information with knowledge, lecturing with teaching, test scores with learning. His enamoration with MOOCs is especially worrisome. Online education cannot possibly replace the human interaction necessary to real education. At best, it can fill in a few gaps and make basic information more accessible, but no computer, no podcast, no on-line video will ever replace real-time, personal teaching. A reasonable facsimile of personal teaching can be done successfully online, live, and often is in places like Maine, whose university system uses teleconferencing technology of various kinds to unite students in remote parts of the state with classrooms at various university centers. That may be part of the new model, but it cannot be allowed to entirely supersede the old one. If the only educational interaction is a recorded one between teacher and student, students still lose. Lively, real-time, in-person discussions are also necessary. So are study groups. And so are late nights in the dorm or a café or a bar chewing over with your friends the ideas you’re learning.

All of these experiences are endangered now when people like Brooks—who is not a professional educator, but an occasional adjunct in the original meaning of the word—talk about moving universities on-line and replacing teachers, instructors, and professors with videos and on-line classes. Learning is a collaboration between teachers, students, administrators, parents, communities. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum all alone in a room. Standardized tests don’t produce it or even encourage it and neither does a standardized curriculum, because people aren’t standardized. We may have a set of concepts that we agree all students should know and be able to navigate, but how those concepts are acquired varies wildly from student to student, grade to grade, subject to subject.

What educators do looks easy, it looks simple, it looks like anybody could do it, and that’s because most of us are good at what we do. Bad teachers, contrary to popular opinion, don’t last any longer than bad middle managers do and don’t affect the overall performance of the system. Students can survive a bad teacher; we all have. We’ve all worked for a company with deadweight employees. Did the failures of that company get blamed on all the workers? No? Funny about that. Because when children fail, it’s always our fault, never the fault of poverty, lack of resources, and lack of institutional support. Not the kids’ fault, not the parents’, not the rigid curriculum we’re forced to used, not the tests we have to teach to, not teaching kids what to think instead of how to think, not the lack of books, libraries, computers, pencils, paper. It’s our fault. Not one single teacher, but every teacher.

On top of this is the outright hostility toward teachers who dare complain they are underpaid and overworked. People in nine-to-five jobs (and I’ve worked those, too) can’t seem to get past the idea that teachers get three months of “vacation” during the year, and that their day “ends” at 3:00 pm. I’ll be the first to say that there are a number of perks to the academic life, but none of them involve a two-month vacation or a day that ends at 3:00 pm. This is true whether you are an elementary school teacher or a college professor. The actual perks are that we get to do something we love intensely; that we’re intellectually challenged every day; that we are more our own bosses than most people working in offices. We have sabbaticals when we do pursue projects we can’t get to at other times; we have more than the average job security if we have tenure (but often far less if we don’t).

One of my fellow teachers recently described her summer work this way: “I’m really enjoying researching and prepping Volpone now. I’m using sources and influences such as Ovid’s Golden Age, Classical Legacy Hunting, Aesop’s fables, Bestiary tales such as Reynard the Fox, Morality plays and Commedia Dell’arte. All very rich and fascinating. Hopefully the students will find it just a fraction as interesting as I do!” And they do, because she makes it fascinating. That’s what good teachers do: open our minds to ideas and works we never would have considered ourselves, even if we had known they existed.

But if we don’t have tenure, or if we’re not on a tenure track, as nearly 75% of our college professors now are not, we have zero job security and opportunity to pursue our own new ideas. Many of us (for I am one of these professors), must scrounge for a new job every semester, and because we are barred from teaching full time at one college or university (to save on paying benefits, you know), we must scrounge for appointments at more than one university. This means most of us spend as much time on the road as we do grading or prepping for class—which we are also not paid for; only our hours in the classroom are, apparently, billable (imagine a lawyer only billing for time spent in court). We don’t advise, we don’t have a voice in university governance or curriculum development, we often don’t even have an office where we can meet students, or the most basic of office support. That means students can never develop intellectual relationships with us, turn to us for meaningful long-term assessment of their work or guidance in their careers, or even for a recommendation letter. If they want to take another class from us, they probably can’t, because we are stuck teaching—not in our areas of expertise—but introductory core and general education courses. Personally, I love those courses, but I would also love to teach a class on, oh, apocalyptic science fiction from the 1950s through the 21st century, to map how our ideas of the apocalypse have or haven’t changed, and how this reflects society’s biggest fears. That will probably never happen in the system we’ve got going now.

Here’s the current destructive game plan for education in this country from K-college: Defund public education and then blame the failures of the system on teachers so it can be privatized to push a curriculum where students are truly badly educated, so they’ll end up either in prison (another privatizing “industry”) or as unthinking, docile cogs that the rich can exploit for profit. This sounds like a radical, reactionary, nut-job conspiracy theory, but it’s what we’re already beginning to see happen. The students who come into my freshman composition class are terrified by the idea that I will not give them the answers for the test, whatever that test is. They have not been taught to analyze or think for themselves, and know how to read only in the sense that they know what the words are individually and in sentence form. They can decipher instructions, but not extrapolate principles or discern subtext.

The last thing an oligarchy or plutocracy run by a minority of wealthy people (the 85 top earners, for example, who now control as much of the wealth as 3.5 billion people) wants is a thinking, intelligent populace to challenge them. If you want unthinking, interchangeable widgets, build a factory—or a charter school. If you want thinking, truly educated students, give professionals the resources—and respect, which includes a decent living wage—they need and get out of their way. And, if you have never spent a moment on the teacher’s side of the desk, stop pretending that you know better than the people who have spent their careers there.

New Year, New Focus

It's been almost a year since I blogged here and I admit I've kinda missed it. I like writing, and I've been doing a fair amount of it (novel, poems, diatribes, conference papers), an awful lot of it on Facebook. In case you haven't been keeping up there, I've gotten myself neck deep in activism of various kinds, mostly the petition signing kind for human rights, environmentalism, social justice of various sorts. But I invested in a pretty big way in the labor movement too, especially educational labor.

For instance, over the summer, I went to the UALE/Cornell Summer School for Union Women, which was a fantastic experience, and at which I made some great friends/contacts. My local, (or one of my locals) AFT 1839 at New Jersey City University, where I'm part of the executive committee, footed the bill, for which I'm extremely grateful, as I couldn't have done so myself. I was on employment for the first time since 1992 because even freelance work is thin on the ground right now. While I was up at Cornell, I met women from all kinds of unions and labor organizations, from all over the world: retail workers from NYC, telephone workers from Africa, forensic lab techs from Puerto Rico, make-up artists, auto workers, housekeepers, cafeteria staff, and a number of faculty members, many of them from CUNY's Professional Staff Congress (PSC) and from SUNY's UUP, both unions I also belong to. I quickly became known as the three-union woman, because I was the only contingent faculty member there (I think). It was a warm, fierce group, and I thank Marcia Newfield of CUNY's PSC for suggesting I go there.

Also on Facebook, I've been doing a lot of national organizing and this last summer, nearly became an on-the-ground organizer for SEIU upstate, at the urgings of my new best friend, Teresa Mack-Piccone, Texan English Ph.D. extraordinaire, who's organizing for them out of Albany. I think 25 years ago I would have been all over that job like white on rice, but I'm pretty sure I don't have the energy for it now. So my organizing has been quieter and a little more subversive. For Campus Equity Week, I plastered my New Jersey campus with signs that said A is for Adjuncts: Our working conditions are Student Learning Conditions, and encouraged folks to post how many adjuncts shared their office or where in their department in very public places. I'd like to follow that up this semester with some agit prop theater in the commons, but I'm not teaching there this time around, so we'll see how that goes.

In the spring. Teresa invited me to give a conference paper with her at the Washington DC SEIU HQ, where I got to meet Joe Berry of COCAL, Maria Maisto of New Faculty Majority, and reconnect with the inimitable Anne Weidner of UUP. We dragged along one of the few vocal tenured allies I've met, Seth Kahn of West Chester U, someone else I met through Facebook, and again met some amazing people fighting to get decent working conditions for adjuncts across the country. I really have to give kudos to SEIU, which is one of the few labor unions in country that's actively organizing adjuncts. The Steelworkers in Pittsburgh were chosen by the adjuncts to represent them, and the same with the UAW in Michigan, but SEIU has gone into DC, Boston, LA and now into New York and actively organized adjucts in a campaign that has been met with as much hostility as any mineowner's, including the hiring of union busting law firms. There's a good use of tuition and endowment money.

And the conditions, make no mistake, are killing us. In September, what I still think of as my semi-hometown paper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, ran a story called "Death of an Adjunct," detailing the miserable conditions 25-year veteran French adjunct professor Margaret Mary Vojtko died in after not being rehired. I don't know an adjunct who isn't terrified that this might be us. More than a few of us are graying (remember, academic careers often don't even start until you're in your 30s or 40s), many of us have chronic conditions, children with chronic conditions, or have been struck down by cancer or other illnesses without any health insurance. Thanks to ACA, that might change, but that doesn't absolve the institutions we work for from treating us with the dignity we deserve. If you can pay for administrators, who add very little to the intellectual reputation of the university, you can damn well pay for the people who make or break your reputation as an institution of learning. More on that in later posts.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say here is that somehow I'm becoming the activist I always wanted to be. I have a cause (several, in fact) and have found my voice, and don't have any fear about using it out loud anymore. I don't have to hide my outrage, and I can use my writing as a way to accomplish something good in the world. This doesn't mean I've given up the creative part; far from in it. In fact, I stumbled into a great writing group and have managed a rewrite of the novel I've been working on forever, and I've been writing a lot of poetry. So this change I've been undergoing, from silent, not very good Christian person, to vocal, skeptical Buddhist fellow-traveller proceeds apace. I like where it's going.

Stay tuned for more about education and activism and education activism.

 

Unsung

The City rebuilds itself on its own ashes,
like Troy on sixteen other Troys—
this burned out hulk where cop and fireman died
herding the innocents in downward flight
no different from the scorched ruins
left beneath centuries
of building and rebuilding in Anatolia.
Except
with no Homer to name their names,
assign their metaphorical attributes,
and send them in perpetuity
with their doomed engines of salvation
to the high smoking towers,
who will know them fifty, a hundred,
two thousand years hence?
Already we forget the names—if we ever knew them—
of the soldiers new fallen in Assyria’s sands
by the waters of Babylon,
the half million citizens
dead of our retribution
against a city that stole nothing
from us.

No bells toll
so read the names,
but intone them all, linking dead with dead:
Agamemnon, Father Mike, Hector;
the Myrmidons, Spartans, Amazons,
Luis Moreno, Allen Greka, Linda Jimenez (the new dead of Akkadia);
the cops, the firemen, the EMTs,
Uhuru Houston, two Angelini, Yamel Merino;
the lawyers, brokers, office workers
of Cantor Fitzgerald, a whole company erased;
Helen and Cassandra, Hecuba,
mothers, wives, and sisters
of busboys,  janitors, CEOs, salesmen; and after,
the searchers, sifters, dismantlers
still choking on the dust and ash.
Even the rescue dogs, exhausted, sad, and footsore,
finding no one alive.

All that’s missing is the gods.

9/11/12

Day of Activism against NDAA

Thought you were safe from indefinite incarceration because of the Constitution?

Thought it was illegal to call in the army for domestic action?

Thought your goods and services were safe from seizure by the government if you were a law-abiding citizen?

Not anymore.

These are powers now vested in the president's office, not just in Obama's hands. Imagine someone like Dick Cheney with these powers. Think Fascism can't happen here? It already has.

Learn about it and and speak out. Before they use it to take your voice away.

;

Occupy Wall Street II—Agendas

Folks in the media and elsewhere complain that OWS has no agenda, has no demands, has no solutions, but I think this is willfully naive and ingenuous. This is not like the 60s, where there were clear cut problems like discrimination and the Vietnam war. This is a failed system, a failed regime, that people are tired of being oppressed by, and if that sounds like pinko commie liberal rhetoric, so be it. There is so much wrong that we hardly know where to begin. Here's the list that I see, in no particular order:

• Enormous wealth disparities between upper management and workers
• Enormous wage disparities between people who actully produce goods and people who just move money around.
• The concentration of liquid capital in the hands of too few people
• Unconscionable tax inequity between the ultra wealthy and the rest of us
• Lack of investment in the infrastructure by the people who make the most use of it, i.e., corporations (see tax inequiety, above)
• Politicians who are unresponsive to constituents who cannot pay to have them re-elected, i.e., corruption
• Raging injustice, as exemplified by Troy Davis, who is only one among hundreds, if not thousands
• A gutting of our educational system by running schools and universities as though they were for-profit corporations or factories and learning was a "product"
• The elevation of profit over the well-being of workers and the nation itself (or the world in general; globalization hasn't treated foreign workers kindly either)
• The glorification of individualism to the point of psychosis (this covers everything from thinking the anonymity of the internet and the right to free speech give you the right to be an uncivil and hateful asshole to the inability to empathize with the plight of people who are not having the same luck in life that you are.) I blame some of this on the gutting of our educational system, where we used to learn to get along with each other.

And that's just my short list. These are systemic problems, social, political, and economic. How do you sum that up in a sign, or make into a list of demands, especially when the people to whom you would present that demand clearly do not give a good goddamn and haven't for the last 30 years? The only documents that would cover these issues were written in 1787 and 1789. They're called the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights. Maybe it's time for new ones.

Occupy Wall Street I—A Personal Story

I've been trying to get to these rallies for the last two weeks and can't seem to shake the cold I've gotten from getting up at 5:30 and getting home at 10:30 twice a week to work two jobs. So I thought I'd use my powers for good, and at least write about why I support them. Unlike a lot of people, I'm not really hurting, or don't consider myself one of the hurting, anyway, in part because I've made certain choices about my life that helped put me where I am. Unlike the so-called 53 Percenters, I realize that no matter how lucky or content I consider myself, this is not what the American Dream is supposed to be.

Despite this cold, I realize I don't have it that bad, so I'm not complaining. I could be doing this five days a week, or seven, like the English department secretary at NJCU, who works at Home Despot or some other big chain store on the weekends. I also don't have a lot of debt, and what I do have is less than five figures—less than most people pay for a car. My student loans were small and are paid off, despite the fact that I went to an expensive private school for my undergrad degree, where I accrued those debts. I had a teaching fellowship at the state school I went to, and I paid tuition there too (which seems unfair when I was also working for the university), but it was in-state tuition and I had no loans. I feel like I live pretty comfortably, but my standard of living is well below what my parents enjoyed, even though neither of them went to college and my dad was a blue-collar worker. I don't own a house or a car, don't even own my apartment. I've got next to nothing in the bank, and a very small retirement fund. Even so, I'm better off than many, and have a lot of freedom and time to myself.

So why am I supporting the protesters at Occupy Wall Street? Because I'm both taking responsibility for my choices and acknowledging that lots of other people don't have that luxury, and/or didn't even make the choices I did and yet find themselves in much worse shape.

As I said on a sign I made for the rallies, I'm a 51-year-old single woman with no dependents (other than my nagging cat, whom I will not have to send to college) and a Master's Degree. I haven't had health insurance since I left school for more than a a few years at a time. I worked full time for a while out of grad school, and a couple of places where, despite my education, I was treated like both an idiot and a flunky, for barely a living wage. Every year, I used up all ten of my sick days in one shot with bronchitis, and spent my two weeks of vacation with my parents. I'd come out here to go to grad school at NYU, where I had no scholarship, so I had to pay for my exorbitant tuition by working full time. About halfway through the second master's degree I was working on in a new field, I realized that several things were going to happen: I would probably have to take out loans to get through the Ph.D., because I was having enough trouble doing the kind of work I knew I was capable of while working full time. The doctorate was going to cost me a fortune and there were no guarantees of a job when I was done. If I did get a job, it was likely to be in the middle of freakin' nowhere, and certainly not in New York City. I wanted to stay here more than I wanted to get a Ph.D., and I wanted to write more than I wanted to be an academic. I hadn't written anything but graduate school papers while I was working full time, and it was killing me. So I totally rethought and refashioned my whole life.

I left school, I quit my full time job, and I started temping and freelancing and working part time. In a lot of ways, my life improved drastically. I was happier, I didn't get sick, I did a lot of writing and started to get published. I had the luxury of taking poorly paid teaching jobs because I was doing other things too, and met some great people along the way, some of whom became life-long friends. In other ways, it was not so good. It was a good thing I didn't get sick or hurt, because health insurance eventually doubled from an affordable $245/month to something astronomically out of reach. Money was very tight, even though my folks helped out, and I learned to live pretty frugally. Even so, there were three years where I couldn't afford to pay the taxes I owed, and didn't file. I also got into some serious credit card debt. The low point was the infamous neck bone stew I made when I was down to my last couple of dollars and waiting for a client to pay me.

To make matters worse, at the time, even when I did get a paycheck, it took days to clear, and often I didn't actually know how much money I had in my account. In nine years of undergrad and graduate school, I'd never bounced a check. Now I did it with alarming frequency because my tally never matched the bank's: not Citibank's, Chase's, or Chemical's. That was because of banking regulations that allowed them to hold even local checks drawn on their own banks, for three days before releasing the funds, instead of making them available right away. Thankfully, that finally changed, but before that, I found a bank, HSBC, that didn't try to screw me with overdraft fees by playing with my balance. I've bounced only one check in the 12 years I've been with them.

I also finally found a great part-time job that I stayed at for just a little more than ten years before there was a mutual parting of the ways. I still had no health insurance, but my bosses treated me with respect and it gave me a lot of freedom and a little 401(k) that I put into a high risk fund to earn some quick dough while my very safe TIAA-CREF fund slowly built up through ultra safe investments. That 401(k) disappeared when the housing bubble burst and the stock market crashed. I cashed in what was left—less than $2,000—because I needed it for living expenses. Since then, I've been freelancing and teaching again, which I love. But I discovered that in the ten years I'd been working part time and only occasionally freelancing, rates for editing and writing have not risen at all. Not even to reflect the cost of living or inflation. In fact, if you consider those two factors, they've actually decreased. There's a lot of work out there for freelance editors, but you should see the griping on the discussion board of the Editorial Freelancers Association.  It's not that we're unhappy about the amount of work, but we're really unhappy about what people want to pay us for our skills and years of experience, and the fact that so many of our clients, even big publishing companies, make us wait 30 to 90 days after submitting an invoice for a paycheck. Until recently, freelancers have had no union or organization to protect them, and why should we need one? Because too many employers want something for nothing.

That's not even my main source of income now, nor the one that concerns me most. My real complaint is the structure and disparity of pay in the post-secondary educational system. This is just one of many places where the capitalistic model has run amok. When I was in grad school in the early 80s, very little teaching was done by adjuncts. Community colleges were populated by teachers with master's degrees, and the PhDs taught at 4-year and graduate institutions. Now, there is such a glut of doctorates (thanks in part to the misleading advising of professors, who seem not to realize that the market isn't infinite), that community colleges regularly require a doctorate for new hires. Worse, as much as 60% of any department's classes are taught by adjuncts now, people with advanced degrees who are limited by policy from most of the rights and privileges of being an academic: no tenure, no job security, no opportunities for research support, and most importantly, no employment benefits. Oh, and did I mention the the wretched pay scale?

When I worked in industry, my skills as an editor and layout designer were billed out at between $60 and $90/hour. Obviously, I didn't make that much myself, but that's what I was worth. Most editorial work goes for about $35/hour, unless it's highly technical or science editing which is far better paid. When I first started teaching as an adjunct at a community college in New Jersey in the 90s, I was paid $1200 for a three-credit class running four months and meeting for 180 minutes a week, and that's not unusual. At one school I recently taught at, I was paid about $1800 for a four credit course that met for about the same number of minutes each week. That's just the gross pay, not the net. and that amounts to about $30/contact hour, the hours I'm actually in class—far less if you include the hours I work outside of class. Neither of those jobs provided me with an office where I could meet students or keep my books or even required me to keep office hours, much less paid me for them. But good teachers always have office hours, always make time to see their students. I can't tell you how much totally unpaid tutoring I've done.

At universities with unions, the pay is much better ($1200 a credit, rather than a class), and so are the working conditions. But I still have no access to affordable health insurance, no job security of any kind (imagine not knowing if your job was going to disappear every four months), and often, my schedule is so crazy that I spend four to six hours on the road just getting to the various places I teach. Needless to say, this makes going to faculty meetings or seminars or anything that might make me better teacher nearly impossible. Not to mention how it isolates you from the rest of the faculty. Just as an example, a couple of years ago I was teaching in Staten Island, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, not all on the same day, but the Staten Island and Bronx jobs were. That meant I left the Bronx in the morning, took a train and an express bus to Staten Island, where I also took a campus bus to my class, taught a three-hour class, had office hours, and took the bus, a ferry, and another train to the Bronx, taught another three-hour class, and took a bus home. If I didn't catch the right ferry, I was late for the Bronx class, so it was always stressful. And the commute was never less than two hours. Now, I have an hour and a half commute to New Jersey for a job that pays well, but not well enough for me not to have to teach somewhere else too, because I'm restricted to 6 credits or two classes. With three, I could actually make a good living.

The adjunct system is good for university endowments, and bad for its students and faculty. The constant searching for, hiring, and class observations of adjuncts, most of whom are transient doctoral students, takes time that department heads and committees could better spend on department administration. Adjuncts are less available to their students, and have less time to spend developing their courses or teaching methods. Many of them are untried as teachers, and don't have much supervision the way we did as teaching assistants at Michigan State. But by god we're cheap, and the administration likes that. In many places, we're as faceless and interchangeable as factory labor, without unions to protect us from lousy pay and long working hours.

Replacing regular tenured faculty with the cheap labor of adjuncts is the equivalent of outsourcing jobs overseas, or hiring illegals to pick your produce. But we're not talking about consumer products here. Education is not a consumer business, though we've led students to believe it is. "I pay this much tuition, I damn well better get good grades," many of them seem to think. They've been led to believe that the value in what they're getting is in their GPA, not in gaining skills or knowledge or learning how to think for themselves. In part, that's another issue, but it's one that has sprung out of the idea that the education is a business, not an art or a service. The product model of education is bankrupt and is bankrupting our future by making students believe that we can just "give" them an education, that they can just "buy" it, not that they have to work for it. Using adjuncts to replace tenured faculty exacerbates this attitude by offering them sometimes-shoddy teaching, and removing the opportunity for them to develop any kind of mentoring relationship with someone they may really feel they learn from. Many of the students I taught in the Bronx were deeply disappointed that I wasn't going to be there this semester to teach a required class I usually teach. One of them begged me to let her email me her paper for some help. How could I say no? I love working at that school because of them, but I can't afford to work there because, even with the maximum number of classes, I can't pay my bills each month.

Let me repeat that, because it's what's fundamentally wrong here: Even if I teach the maximum number of classes (3) I'm allowed, even with with a special dispensation for an extra class, and a class or two at another institution, I cannot pay my very modest bills, let alone save anything, or afford health insurance. Four to five classes are considered a full-time load. Even with that, I am barely getting by.

This is what the 99% are pissed about.

The social contract used to be that if you worked hard, got an education, and found a job, you could make a decent living. That is no longer true. You can work hard, get an education, find not one job, but two or three, and still live at the poverty level with no sense of security. Now, my choices to work part time instead of full time earlier in my life have given me less security for the future than most people, and that was my choice. I'm not complaining about that; I knew what I was doing when I did it. What is deeply wrong, however, is that so many of us must work extravagant hours well beyond the 40 hour work week to even keep your head above water. There is no getting ahead anymore, except for a very few. Costs have risen, wages have fallen, and the middle class seems to be paying for almost everything.

Taxes that should go to infrastructure go instead to the military industrial complex for unnecessary wars. And the people who use that infrastructure the most don't help pay for its upkeep. Sure, we all use in the infrastructure: roads, dams, railroads, telecom, electricity. But without that infrastructure, no business would even get off the ground, let alone grow to become a multimillion or -billion dollar enterprise. As I said in a conversation on Facebook, shipping companies, not cars, beat the roads and bridges to pieces . Bandwidth is eaten up by corporations, not private users (it's why they're trying to suppress streaming video--because it cuts into their usage). Corporations are the largest consumers of electricity (who leaves all those lights on in the skyscrapers?). Passenger trains make way for freight, which is what the majority of rail traffic is. Harbor facilities are almost exclusively for shipping and freight now, with a little bit of passenger traffic. Even airlines make more money from cargo than passengers. And who craps up the water? I'm not dumping any chemicals down my toilet, are you? The heaviest users need to pay the heaviest "fee," in taxes, for that usage. It makes their wealth possible.

Not to mention that we, the workers—the teachers who educate them; the technicians who keep the equipment running; the people at the CAD station doing the specs and on the production line following them; the salespeople on the road; the marketers and graphic artists who provide the sales materials; the packagers, truck drivers, train engineers, and other shippers and delivery people; the HR people who keep employees happy and bargain for the best benefits; and the people who manage these people, are all doing the actual work. Without them, commerce grinds to a halt. We're not asking for anything more than our fair share of your success, 1%. We all helped make you what you are. This goes for the Masters of the Universe who do nothing more than move that capital around. Why do they earn so much for producing nothing tangible, especially when they have the power to wreck entire nations, and aren't afraid to do it? Capitalism is as much a group effort as Socialism; Socialism just distributes the rewards more equitably. What we have now looks more and more like feudalism.

And this isn't even touching on the corruption of our representatives by PAC money, or the safety net we all, as moral human beings, owe the weakest members of our society. Without a sense of obligation to one another, we are worse than animals. This is what bothers me about the so-called 53%, many of whom have the attitude that "I work hard and get by. The rest of you are just whiners." There is a shocking lack of empathy or foresight in that attitude. How stupid do you have to be to realize that if you're hit by a truck tomorrow and paralyzed from the waist down, your working days at your three jobs are over? Do you really want your alternatives to be begging in the street or a private charity poor house? None of us are immune to disaster or misfortune. Some of us, in fact, are born into it and have no power to change it for the first 18 years of our lives. The cold-hearted selfishness of this "I've got mine, screw the rest of you" attitude sickens me, and millions of others.

I've made choices in my life that leave me more vulnerable financially than many, and I'm willing to shoulder that responsibility. All I want is the opportunity to make a decent living at something I'm very good at doing. I don't want a handout, or even a hand up. All I want, all most of us want, is a fair shake for our own efforts.